Vatican City, May 26, 2013 / 07:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Sicily celebrated the beatification of Father Giuseppe Puglisi yesterday, and Pope Francis used it as an occasion to pray for the conversion of the Mafia.
After he recited the Angelus on May 25, Pope Francis noted that Fr. Puglisi – a priest who was killed in 1993 by the Mafia – was beatified in Palermo on Saturday.
“Don Puglisi was an exemplary priest, devoted especially to youth ministry. He was teaching children according to the gospel and taking them out of the mob, and so they tried to defeat him and killed him. In reality, though, it is he that won, with Christ Risen,” the Pope told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square.
These gangs “cause so much pain to men, women and even to children,” he said, mentioning prostitution as one type of slavery or social pressure used by the mafia.
Pope Francis urged the faithful in the square to “pray for these gangsters so that they convert.”
The murder of Fr. Puglisi was a turning point for the Church in how it dealt with the Mafia.
Blessed Puglisi pursued a course of winning people away from the influence of the mob, as opposed to a protest model of resistance, which was more common among clergy at the time.
Shocked by his death and inspired by his example, many of Sicily’s priests began to follow the more influence-driven approach of Bl. Puglisi.
“We praise God for his luminous testimony,” Pope Francis said after the Angelus, “and we treasure his example!”
Vatican City, May 26, 2013 / 06:25 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As he celebrated the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, Pope Francis spoke about how God is love, but not in an “emotional” or “sentimental” way.
“The light of Easter and Pentecost have renewed in us each year the joy and wonder of faith that recognizes that God is not something vague, abstract, but has a name: ‘God is love,’” the Pope said May 26, before reciting the Angelus in St. Peter’s Square.
And this love “is not sentimental, emotional, but the love of the Father who is the source of all life, the love of the Son who died on the cross and rose, the love of the Spirit who renews man and the world,” he stated.
Pope Francis then reflected on how the Trinity “is not the product of human reasoning, it is the face which God himself revealed, not from the top of a throne, but walking with humanity in the history of the people of Israel, and above all in Jesus of Nazareth.
“Jesus is the Son who made us know the merciful Father and brought to the world his ‘fire,’ the Holy Spirit,” he said.
On today’s feast, he explained, “we praise God not for a particular mystery, but for himself, ‘for his glory is immense,’ as the liturgical hymn says. We praise him and thank him because he is love, and for how he calls us to enter the embrace of his communion, which is eternal life.”
Because of celebrations for the Year of Faith in previous weeks, today was the first time in a month that the Pope delivered his words from the window of the papal apartment.
Without those festivities, the crowd was also not as large as before, but it made up for it with the presence of a troupe of people dressed in medieval garb – accompanied by a section of drums and trumpets – a large delegation from an Italian military association and a group of faithful from China who came to Rome to pray for their local Church.
Pope Francis explained to the assembly that he had just finished making his first trip as pontiff to a parish in the Rome diocese and he thanked the Lord for the visit.
He also asked the crowd to “pray for my pastoral service in this Church, which has the mission of presiding in universal charity.”
Before reciting the Angelus with the faithful, Pope Francis said, “we entrust our praise to the hands of the Virgin Mary.
“She, the most humble of creatures, through Christ has already reached the goal of our earthly pilgrimage: she is already in the glory of the Trinity. She shines for us as a sign of sure hope and solace and accompanies us on the path.”
After the Marian prayer, the Pope highlighted a beatification that took place in Palermo, Sicily on Saturday for Father Giuseppe Puglisi, a priest who was killed by the Mafia in 1993.
“Don Puglisi was an exemplary priest, devoted especially to youth ministry. He was teaching children according to the gospel and taking them out of the mob, and so they tried to defeat him and killed him. In reality, though, is he that won, with Christ Risen.”
The murder of Fr. Puglisi was a turning point for the Church in how it dealt with the Mafia.
Blessed Puglisi pursued a course of winning people away from the influence of the mob, as opposed to a protest model of resistance, which was more common among clergy at the time. Shocked by his death and inspired by his example, many of Sicily’s priests began to follow the more pastoral approach of Bl. Puglisi.
“We praise God for his luminous testimony,” Pope Francis said after today’s Angelus, “and we treasure his example!”
Vatican City, May 21, 2013 / 01:39 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- While acknowledging that power struggles have existed in the Church since it began, Pope Francis said Jesus’ teaching on power leaves no room for them.
“In the Church the greatest is the one who serves most, the one who is at the service of others,” said Pope Francis on May 21.
“This is the rule, yet from the beginning until now there have been power struggles in the Church, even in our manner of speech,” he said in his homily, which was based on the day’s Gospel reading from Mark 9.
In the reading, Jesus catches the disciples arguing about which of them is the greatest.
“In the Gospel of Jesus, the struggle for power in the Church must not exist because true power, that which the Lord by his example has taught us, is the power of service,” said the Pope.
But the Pope believes the struggle for power in the Church is “nothing new” and that it first appearing when Jesus was forming his disciples.
Pope Francis noted, “when a person is given a job, one that in the eyes of the world is a superior role, they say ‘ah, this woman has been promoted to president of that association, or this man was promoted.’”
“This verb, to promote, yes, it is a nice verb and one we must use in the Church,” he said.
“Yes, he was promoted to the Cross, he was promoted to humiliation,” the Pope remarked.
“True promotion,” he underscored, “is that which makes us seem more like Jesus.”
“If we do not learn this Christian rule, we will never, ever be able to understand Jesus’ true message on power,” said Pope Francis.
“Real power is service as he did, he who came not to be served but to serve, and his service was the service of the Cross,” he said.
The pontiff explained that Jesus “humbled himself unto death, even death on a cross for us, to serve us, to save us and there is no other way in the Church to move forward.”
Pope Francis also drove home his point by recalling that Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of his religious order the Jesuits, asked Jesus for the grace of humiliation.
“This is the true power of the service of the Church, this is the true path of Jesus, true and not worldly advancement,” said the pontiff.
“The path of the Lord is being in his service as he carried out his service, we must follow him, on the path of service, that is the real power in the Church,” he stated.
The congregation included the president and vice-president of the Focolare Movement, Maria Voce and Giancarlo Faletti, as well as the director of the magazine Civiltà Cattolica, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro.
Staff from Vatican Radio and the Office of the Vatican City State Governatorate also attended.
During the prayers of the faithful, Pope Francis prayed for the victims of the tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on the afternoon of May 20. The twister claimed the lives of at least 91 people, including 20 children.
