(Vatican Radio) March 24th is recognized as an international day for the victims of human rights violations, in honour of the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero who was murdered while saying Mass on this day in 1980. He was shot dead by hired assassins because he had become an increasingly outspoken opponent of the El Salvador’s government and military leadership, making public each week a list of the victims of the civil war.
Across Latin America Romero has long been revered by many as ‘the voice of voiceless’, an inspirational figure for all who struggle to uphold the gospel values of human dignity, justice and peace. In February this year Pope Francis approved a decree saying that Romero had been killed out of “hatred for his faith”, paving the way for his beatification which is scheduled to take place in San Salvador on May 23rd.
Among those who’ve been personally inspired by Romero’s dedication to the poorest and most vulnerable is the former director of the English Catholic aid agency CAFOD, Julian Filochowsky, who also heads the London based Romero Trust.
Listen to Philippa Hitchen’s report:
(from Vatican Radio)…
A special visit to the
Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel for some 150 homeless people has been organized by the Office of Papal
Charities. Led by Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, on Thursday, 26 March, the poor,
who usually see only the steps outside the colonnade of St Peter’s Square, will
also have a chance to enjoy the
Vatican’s artistic patrimony. The visit is scheduled for the early afternoon: these guests will enter the Vatican through the
Petriano entrance where they will be divided into three groups, each one will
be entrusted to a guide. Before entering the Museums these groups will enjoy a
privileged tour inside Vatican City State, passing the Domus Sanctae
Marthae, behind St Peter’s Basilica, through the piazzale della Zecca, the main path of the Gardens and the Cancello di Gregogio….
How many people say they are Christians but don’t accept “the way” that
God wants to save us? They are the ones Pope Francis defined as “Christians,
yes, but…”, incapable of understanding that salvation passes through the
cross. And Jesus on the Cross — the Pontiff explained in his homily during Mass
at Santa Marta on Tuesday, 24 March — is the very “core of the message of the
day’s Liturgy”. In the passage from the
Gospel according to John (8:21-30), Jesus says: “When you have lifted up the
Son of man…” and, foretelling of his death on the cross, evokes the bronze
serpent that Moses raised “to heal the Israelites in the desert” and which was
recounted in the First Reading from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9). The People of
God enslaved in Egypt, the Pope explained, had been freed: “They had truly seen
miracles. And when they were afraid, at the time of the Pharaoh’s persecution,
when they were faced with the Red Sea, they saw the miracle” that God performed
for them. The “journey of liberation” thus began in joy. The Israelites “were
happy” because they had been “liberated from slavery”, happy because “they
carried with them the promise of very good land, a land for them alone”, and
because “none of them had died” on the first part of the journey. The women
were also happy because they had “the jewels of the Egyptian women” with them. At a certain point
though, the Pontiff continued, at the moment in which “the journey was getting
long”, the people could no longer bear it and “they grew tired”. Therefore they
began to speak “against God and against Moses: why have you brought us up out
of Egypt to die in the wilderness?”. They began to “criticize: to speak against
God, against Moses”, saying: “Here there is no bread and no water, and we
loathe this worthless food, this manna”. In other words, the Israelites
“loathed God’s help, a gift of God. And thus that initial joy of liberation
became sorrow, complaining”. They would have
probably preferred to be freed by “a magician performing magic with a wand”
rather than a God who made them walk and made them “earn salvation” or “at
least partly deserve it” by acting “in a
certain way”. In the Scripture we
meet a “discontented people” and, Francis pointed out, “criticizing is a way
out of this discontentment”. In their discontent, “they vented, but they didn’t
realize that the soul becomes poisoned with this attitude”. Thus, the serpents
arrive, because “like this, like the venom of serpents, at this moment these
people had a poisoned spirit”. Jesus, too, speaks of
the same attitude, of “this way of not being content, not satisfied”. The
Pontiff then referred to a passage from the Gospels of both Matthew (11:17) and
Luke (7:32): “When Jesus speaks of this attitude He says: ‘How are you to be
understood? Are you like those youths in the square: we played for you and you
did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn. Does nothing satisfy you?’”.
The problem “wasn’t salvation” but rather “liberation”, because “everyone wanted
this”; the problem was “God’s way: they didn’t like dancing to God’s song; they
didn’t like mourning to God’s lamentations”. So “what did they want”? They
wanted, the Pope explained, to act “according to their own thoughts, to choose
their own path to salvation”. But that path “didn’t lead to anything”. This is an attitude
that we still encounter today. “Among Christians”, Francis asked, how many are
“somewhat poisoned” by this discontentment? We hear: “Yes, truly, God is good.
Christians, yes, but…”. They are the ones, he continued, “who end up not
opening their heart to God’s salvation” and who “always ask for conditions”;
the ones who say: “Yes, yes, yes, I want to be saved, but on this path”. This
is how “the heart becomes poisoned”. This is the heart of “lukewarm Christians”
who always have something to complain about: “‘Why has the Lord done this to
me?’ — ‘But He saved you, He opened the door for you, He forgave you of so many
sins’ — ‘Yes, yes, it’s true, but…’”. Thus the Israelites in the desert said:
“I would like water, bread, but the kind I like, not not this worthless food. I
loathe it”. And we too “so often say that we loathe the divine way”. Francis emphasized:
“Not accepting the gift of God with his way, that is the sin; that is the venom;
that poisons our soul, it takes away your joy, it doesn’t let you go”. So “how does the Lord
resolve this? With poison itself, with sin itself”: in other words “He takes
the poison, the sin, upon Himself and is lifted up”. Thus “this warmth of soul,
this being halfway Christians” this being “Christians, yes, but…” becomes
healed. The healing, the Pope explained, comes only by “looking to the cross”,
by looking to God who takes on our sins: “my sin is there”. However “how many
Christians in the desert die of their sorrow, of their complaining, of their
not wanting God’s way”. This is for every Christian to reflect upon: while God
“saves us and shows us what salvation is like”, I “am not really able to
tolerate a path that I don’t like much”. This is the “selfishness that Jesus
rebukes in his generation”, which said of John the Baptist: “He has a demon”.
And when the Son of Man came, He was defined as a “glutton” and a “drunkard”.
And so, the Pope asked, “who understands you?”. He added, “I too, with my
spiritual caprice regarding the salvation that God gives me, who understands
me?”. Therefore, there is an
invitation to the faithful: “Look at the serpent, the venom there in the Body
of Christ, the poison of all the sins of the world and let ask for the grace to
accept the divine way of salvation; to also accept this food, so wretched that
the Hebrews complained about it”: the grace, that is, “to accept the ways by
which the Lord leads me forth”. Francis concluded by praying that Holy Week may
“help us to leave behind this temptation to become “ Christians, yes, but…’”….
In mapping the
journey of evangelization, Pope Francis warns, discerningly, of obstacles on
the way. He cautions about the “dark side” of secularity: the individualism it
breeds, the relativism it propagates, the consumerism it celebrates, the “throw
away” mentality that follows in its wake. Francis also draws on the church’s
teachings on social justice to denounce a rapacious economic system that
produces dehumanizing poverty, both material and cultural, for many. But Francis also bluntly addresses
obstacles to the joyful proclamation of the Gospel that reside within the
church itself. Among these he lists the lack of a truly collegial sharing of
gifts and a clericalism motivated more by power-seeking than service of the
Gospel. And his discernment probes deeper still. The Pope frequently warns of a
“worldly spirituality” that has lost its anchor in Christ and the Spirit and
drifts aimlessly. Too often we permit others to set the agenda rather than
allow Christ and his Gospel to direct our undertakings. He laments: At times our media culture and some
intellectual circles convey a marked skepticism
with regard to the Church’s message, along with a certain cynicism. As a consequence, many pastoral workers,
although they pray, develop a sort of inferiority
complex which leads them to relativize or conceal their Christian identity and convictions. This produces
a vicious circle. They end up being unhappy
with who they are and what they do; they do not identify with their mission of evangelization and this weakens
their commitment. They end up stifling
the joy of mission with a kind of obsession about being like everyone else and possessing what everyone else possesses.
Their work of evangelization thus becomes
forced, and they devote little energy and very limited time to it (79). The only remedy for such alienation
is conversion: turning again to the person of Jesus Christ and to the joy of
encounter with him. Thus the Pope writes: “I invite all Christians, everywhere,
at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at
least an openness to letting him encounter them. I ask all of you to do this
unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for
him or her, since “no one is excluded from the joy brought by the Lord” (3). Francis reiterates here what he has
often stressed in homilies and talks: the heart of the Gospel is mysticism more
than moralism. Of course, Christians must come to the aid of the poor and
oppressed. They must be concerned about environmental degradation and religious
intolerance and persecution. But this moral sensibility flows from a compelling
and sustaining vision: the vision of the Lord who was crucified for our
justification and raised to life for our salvation. Ultimately, the love of
Jesus impels us. So Francis writes: “The primary reason for evangelizing is the
love of Jesus which we have received, the experience of salvation which urges
us to ever greater love of him. What kind of love would not
feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point
him out, to make him known? If we do not feel an intense desire to share this love, we need to pray insistently
that he will once more touch our hearts. We need
to implore his grace daily, asking him to open our cold hearts and shake up our lukewarm and superficial existence” (264). Francis shares with Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI the conviction that the evangelical task is to promote a new or
renewed encounter with the Mystery of God in Christ. They both insist that our
communication must be “mystagogical:” leading into a deeper realization of the
inexhaustible Mystery of our saving God. Such communication recognizes the
importance of image and symbol, of art and poetry. It urges evangelizers,
homilists, and theologians to appeal not only to truth and goodness, but to
beauty as well. Francis recommends “a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of
touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen
Christ to radiate within it…. A formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the
faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in
evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the
wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new
“language of parables” (167). The theme of the “newness” of Jesus
Christ permeates Evangelii Gaudium .
The risen Jesus is the heart of the Good News we seek to live and to share.
Pope Francis quotes St Irenaeus: “By his coming, Christ brought with him all
newness”. The Holy Father then comments: “With this newness Jesus is always
able to renew our lives and our communities,
and even if the Christian
message has known periods of darkness and ecclesial weakness, it will never grow old…Each time we return to the source
and recover the original
freshness of the Gospel, new paths open – creative methods, different forms of expression, more eloquent signs,
words filled with new meaning for today’s
world. In reality, every authentic act of evangelization is always ‘new’”(11). The reason
evangelizers can venture forth boldly, even to the farthest peripheries, is
that their Center is secure: Jesus Christ “the same, yesterday, today, and
forever” (Heb 13:8). Because the risen Lord is ever new, he makes all things
new. Robert P. Imbelli…
Rome – “Tomorrow we Bishops of the Permanent Council will dedicate a special moment of prayer for the martyrs, missionaries and lay people, of today: we want them to feel the closeness of our love and of our communities, and the overwhelming gratitude for the example of intrepid faith. The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians!”. This is what Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Italian Episcopal Conference said yesterday afternoon, March 23, in his speech during the opening session of the Permanent Council of CEI. The Cardinal dedicated a considerable part of his speech to the theme of the persecution of Christians: “We cannot but remain painfully astonished before the persecution against Christians that grows and becomes cruel. The world of faith, of common sense, the human world remains baffled and beaten”. Questioning the reasons for the persecution, he said: “One cannot but condemn such barbaric and studied cruelty against minorities, especially against Christians only because Christians. One cannot but condemn crazy and bloody strategies. Religion can never be challenged to kill or do violence”. Finally, he stressed: “While it remains an urgent responsibility to ensure the rights of religious freedom in the world, once again we urge Europe to a serious examination of conscience on the phenomenon of Westerners who enlist in the death squads”….