Showing posts with label John Paul II. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Paul II. Show all posts

Wednesday 7 October 2015

Two synods and life in the church community

English: Pope John Paul II on 12 August 1993 i...
English: Pope John Paul II on 12 August 1993 in Denver (Colorado) Español: Papa Juan Pablo II el 12 de agosto de 1993 en Denver, Colorado. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At the  moment two synods may fetch the news.
the most spoke off is the meeting of the Catholic bishops at the Vatican. the other one is of the Church of England. They have a General Synod that experienced such a struggle over women bishops, only 28 per cent of the clergy voted on to it were women, and not one of them was under 40. Those who were openly part of racial, disability, or LGBT minority groups were woefully under-represented in the decisions that the Church made about them.

In Church Times Revd Sally Hitchiner is Chaplain to Brunel University, London, argues that we need to put our votes where our tweets are.
She writes:
The challenge and opportunity that we are facing now is that the General Synod seems to be leading and speaking for the Church more than the rest of us are. More column inches are given to Synod statements than to any other branch of the Church. The Reform and Renewal movement is Synod-led, not merely bishop-led. The opportunities for this Synod to have an impact on daily life for us all are considerable.
> Why the Synod is important

After Pope Francis‘s tour of the United States he looked having become much older and being very slow when he opened the Vatican’s synod on marriage and family topics.

Last year bishops gathered for an extraordinary synod on the family and they will continue on that issue to see what can be amended after the church-fathers spoke with their priests and flock. This synod should end with a document, and possibly from that document Francis will write an apostolic exhortation.

The very conservative  John Paul II presented some years ago the "Theology of the Body" but all that the Catholic church did seemed very far away from what Catholics were doing and believing. In Belgium every Catholic seems to make up his own sort of belief and does not really follow up what the Pope describes. The Catholic Church did not help it by not heaving an ear for divorced Catholics who still wanted to receive communion or to get remarried for the church.
The Catholic understanding of marriage is lofty enough that a “cheap grace” that gives up too early defrauds the recipients from a great gift – the strength that comes with fighting through hardship. But so many people, mostly women, have been damaged unspeakably by an ethic that is unrelenting in its call to keep returning to a bad relationship that the Church has to be sensitive to the need to protect its more vulnerable members. {Writing straight with our crooked lines: #Synod15, family, and the hot issues; Reading Francis}
writes somebody who claims to have studied Catholic social thought in graduate school 20 years ago.

When we do see and hear Pope Francis I  we get the impression he is really some one who is willing to listen to the ordinary folks and to come closer to them. this pope also wants to show the importance of forgiving love, and this could help into the guidelines for openness for those who went wrong in their life and want to restart again.

Too often the clerics had forgotten how the church community is made up by those people who walk every day on the street as unnoticed ordinary human beings, with their small and big problems in life. For much too long the church-leaders have been absent from their real life and did not have enough ears fro their little and big problems. Perhaps there might change something now.

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Tuesday 9 June 2015

Russian President Vladimir Putin meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican

Maps of the Roman Empire in Rome.
Maps of the Roman Empire in Rome. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
 In Bible terms the Pope and Putin are massively important players in prophecy. Daniel 7 tells us about the Pope and Daniel 8 about Putin. Daniel 7 tracks the little horn (a horn is a ruler) who comes out of the Roman Empire who speaks great things against God and changes the times and seasons. The ruler described is the religious power of Rome headed by the Pope who claimed he was the Holy Father – they even changed our calendar! The little horn of Daniel 8 is different. This is NOT Rome. This horn comes out of Greece – he was Antiochus Epiphanes. But a latter day king of the north exists – this time in Russia.

Tomorrow(on June 10) Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican, with conflicts in Syria and Ukraine likely to top the Holy See's agenda.
Putin last called on Francis on November 25, 2013. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Thursday the meeting would take place in the afternoon of June 10; Putin is expected to visit Russia's pavilion at the Expo world's fair in Milan, where June 10 has been slated as Russia's national day.


After nearly a half-century of hostility between the Vatican and the Kremlin during the Cold War, a major breakthrough came just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, met the Polish-born pontiff, John Paul II.
After a 2009 visit by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia and the Holy See upgraded their diplomatic relations to full-fledged ties, with ambassadors..

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Monday 29 July 2013

Slum pope joins Catholic jamboree on famous beach of Copacabana

Up to three million people descended on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro to hear an address by Pope Francis.
From all over the world Catholic youngsters found their way to Brasil to meat other Catholic believers. they also did not want to miss the head of the Catholic Church Pope Francis I.
English: Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Bra...
 Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The whole happening you could have called a Christian Carnival.
The 76-year-old Argentine seemed entirely at home, wading into cheering crowds, kissing people young and old and telling them the Catholic Church is on their side.
Called the “slum pope” for his work with the poor, Francis received a rapturous welcome in the Varginha shantytown, part of a slum area of northern Rio so violent it’s known as the Gaza Strip.
The Varginha visit was one of the highlights of Francis’ weeklong trip to Brazil, his first as pope and one seemingly tailor-made for the first pontiff from the Americas.
Further surprise came though during his encounter with Argentine pilgrims, scheduled at the last minute in yet another sign of how this spontaneous pope is shaking up the Vatican’s staid and often stuffy protocol.
From the slum, Francis traveled to Rio's modern cathedral, where he received a roaring welcome from tens of thousands of young Argentines who were in Rio for the Catholic jamboree.
The Pope showed his awareness of the bad circumstances those people have to live in:
“No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world!” Francis told the crowd of thousands who braved a cold rain and stood in a muddy soccer field to welcome him.“No amount of peace-building will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of it”.
The pope made an appeal to those in possession of greater resources:
"to public authorities and to all people of good will who are working for social justice: never tire of working for a more just world, marked by greater solidarity!” he said.
He insisted more needed to be done to bridge the gap between rich and poor at the root of social injustice, in what seemed a clear reference to the Brazilian situation, and the forcible ‘pacification’ of a few of the favela slums.
The previous popes may have had difficulties with the priests and bishops who had problems with the rich church and the poor population. this pope also wants the church getting closer to the people. It would even be nice if the Catholic church could get rid of clericalism and  the mundane uttered Pope Francis.
He compared the purity of the Catholic faith with the blended fruit drinks popular in Brazil:
 “Please, don’t blend faith in Jesus. There are apple shakes, orange shakes, banana shakes, but, please, don’t drink a ‘licuado de fe (faith shake)!’ Faith is complete!”
Francis urged the 3 million young Catholics present on the world famous beach of Copacabana, to go out and spread their faith
 “to the fringes of society, even to those who seem farthest away, most indifferent.”“The church needs you, your enthusiasm, your creativity and the joy that is so characteristic of you!” he said to applause in his final homily of World Youth Day.
It is incredible that so many youngsters can be brought to travel such far distances to come and see the pope and to spend some days with each other.This year it where two million ore than the last World Youth Day in Madrid in 2011 or the 850,000 at Toronto’s 2002 concluding Mass.
Only Pope John Paul II’s Mass during his 1995 visit to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, topped Rio’s numbers, with an estimated 5 million people taking part. Third place among papal Masses now goes to Rome World Youth Day in the 2000 Jubilee year, when 2 million people participated. A similar number attended John Paul’s final Mass in Krakow, his Polish hometown, in 1979, during his first visit to his homeland as pope.
Saturday night's vigil capped a busy day for the pope in which he drove home a message he has emphasised throughout the week in speeches, homilies and off-the-cuff remarks: the need for Catholics – lay and religious – to shake up the status quo, get out of their stuffy sacristies and reach the faithful on the margins of society or risk losing them to rival churches.
In the longest and most important speech yet of his four-month pontificate, Francis took a direct swipe at the "intellectual" message of the church that so characterised the pontificate of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Speaking to Brazil's bishops, he said ordinary Catholics did not understand such lofty ideas and needed to hear the simpler message of love, forgiveness and mercy that was at the core of the Catholic faith.
"At times we lose people because they don't understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people," he said. "Without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery."
"You are often disappointed by facts that speak of corruption on the part of people who put their own interests before the common good," Francis told the crowd. "To you and all, I repeat: Never yield to discouragement, do not lose trust, do not allow your hope to be extinguished." 
In a speech outlining the kind of church he wants, Francis asked bishops to reflect on why hundreds of thousands of Catholics had left the church for Protestant and Pentecostal congregations that have grown exponentially in recent decades in Brazil, particularly in its slums.

Nuns joined the beachfront vigil led by Pope Francis for the 28th World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, with many of the three million-strong crowd staying put for mass
Nuns joined the beachfront vigil led by Pope Francis for the 28th World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, with many of the three million-strong crowd staying put for mass

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article-2380378/Three-million-faithful-Catholics-pack-Rios-Copacabana-beach-final-Mass-Pope-Franciss-tour-Brazil.html#ixzz2aRPtYjqL

Once in a lifetime: Nuns mixed with bikini-clad young women as nearly the entire 2.5-mile crescent of Copacabana¿s broad beach in Rio overflowed with people
Once in a lifetime: Nuns mixed with bikini-clad young women as nearly the entire 2.5-mile crescent of Copacabana's broad beach in Rio overflowed with people

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article-2380378/Three-million-faithful-Catholics-pack-Rios-Copacabana-beach-final-Mass-Pope-Franciss-tour-Brazil.html#ixzz2aRPWwpgR
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