(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Thursday said that God is like a mother, He loves us unconditionally, but too often we want to take control of this grace in a kind of a spiritual book-keeping. The Pope was speaking during his homily at morning Mass in the Casa Santa Marta. Taking his cue from the…
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(Vatican Radio) ‘No longer slaves, but brothers and sisters’ is the theme of the 2015 World Peace Day Message which was released at a press conference in the Vatican on Wednesday. The Pope’s annual message is drawn up with the help of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, but speakers at the press conference…
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(Vatican Radio) ‘No longer slaves, but brothers and sisters’ is the theme of the 2015 World Peace Day Message which was released at a press conference in the Vatican on Wednesday. The Pope’s annual message is drawn up with the help of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, but speakers at the press conference…
Read more
(Vatican Radio) ‘No longer slaves, but brothers and sisters’ is the theme of the 2015 World Peace Day Message which was released at a press conference in the Vatican on Wednesday. The Pope’s annual message is drawn up with the help of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, but speakers at the press conference this year also included sisters who have been pioneering the Church’s battle against trafficking for the past two decades. Philippa Hitchen reports……
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Sisters on the front line of the fight against modern slavery were guest speakers in the Vatican press office, sharing their personal experience of working with trafficked victims in Italy, India, Brazil, Nigeria and Costa Rica. They included Sr Gabriella Bottani, the new head of the ‘Talitha Kum’ international network of sisters against trafficking, who spoke of the particular role that Pope Francis has highlighted for women working to raise awareness of this modern form of slavery.
She noted that this year’s message stresses the need for a widespread mobilisation of all people of good will to combat this growing phenomenon, urging us not to turn away and become accomplices to the suffering of our brothers and sisters. Also giving first hand testimony of the work her sisters are doing to support victims and prosecute the traffickers was Sr Sharmi D’Souza from India.
She said the sisters go with the police on raids in the brothels and rescue the girls, for example, in one raid, she said they rescued 37 girls, of whom 11 were working as underage prostitutes. From these girls, she said, they are able to find out all the details of who the traffickers are and where they work, so that her lawyer sisters have already helped to put 30 traffickers in jail.
Sr Sharmi also appealed for the “bishops, priests and pastors” to stand with the sisters and help them in the grass roots work they’re doing in so many countries around the world. I asked the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson how he can encourage more Church leaders to take up this challenge?
He said the Peace Day Messages are sent via the nuncios to bishops around the world and he encouraged them to constitute study groups to respond to the call of the message. If Christmas and New Year are not a good time to do this, he said, choose another time of year – as India has done – to celebrate and raise awareness around this theme.
In particular the cardinal suggested the date of February 8th, feast day of the Sudanese slave girl, Saint Josephine Bakhita which the Church has designated a day of prayer for all victims of slavery and trafficking.
In the message Pope Francis mentions so many ways in which people continue to be enslaved and exploited today: in domestic or agricultural work, in the manufacturing or mining industry, migrants living and working in inhuman conditions, child soldiers, women forced into arranged marriages, and those trafficked for organ transplants, drug smuggling, begging or other illegal activities. As well as praising the “silent efforts” of so many religious to support and rehabilitate the victims, the Pope also calls for “a shared commitment” by States, businesses, intergovernmental organisations and individuals to “offer hope, open doors” and help combat this crime against humanity.
(from Vatican Radio)…
Vatican City, 10 December 2014 (VIS) – The 7th World Meeting of Families will take place from 22 to 27 September 2015 in Philadelphia, U.S.A., and its theme will be “Love is our mission: the family fully alive”, as announced by Pope Francis in a letter addressed to Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in which he also confirms his attendance at the event. “The mission of the Christian family, today as in the past, is that of announcing God’s love to the world, with the strength of the nuptial Sacrament. From this same announcement a living family is born and is constructed, that places love at the centre of all its human and spiritual dynamism. If, as St. Irenaeus said, ‘Gloria Dei vivens homo’, also a family that lives fully its vocation and mission, with the Lord’s grace, renders glory to Him”. Francis remarked that during the recent Synod on the family the most urgent issues affecting the family in our society were identified, and he underlined that “we cannot qualify a family with ideological concepts, we cannot speak about a conservative family or a progressive family. The family is the family! The values and virtues of the family, its essential truths, are the strong points on which the family nucleus rests, and they cannot be called into question”. We are required, instead, to “review our style of life, that is always open to the risk of being ‘contaminated’ by a worldly mentality – individualist, consumerist, hedonistic – and to rediscover the high road, to live and to propose the greatness and beauty of marriage and the joy and being and forming a family”. Both the indications given in the Final Report of the Synod and those that guide the path to the October 2015 Ordinary Assembly “invite us to continue in our efforts in announcing the Gospel of marriage and the family, and of experiencing the pastoral proposals in the social and cultural context in which we live. The challenges of this context stimulate us to broaden our capacity for faithful love open to life, to communion, to mercy, to sharing and to solidarity”, concluded Pope Francis, exhorting married couples, priests, and associations to let themselves “be guided by the Word of God, on which there rest the foundations of the holy edifice of the family, domestic Church and family of God”….