Pope Francis: 'yes' to Holy Spirit prevents division

(CNA/EWTN News)  Pope Francis said that Church divisions begin when it does not say ‘yes’ to the Holy Spirit and allow it to work.

“The divisions in the Church begin, the sects, all of these things, when we do not let him work because we are closed to the truth of the Spirit,” he said in the homily for his May 2 morning Mass.

“He always does a nice job, the Holy Spirit, throughout history,” he quipped, as he celebrated Mass with Cardinal Albert Malcolm Ranjith from Colombo, Sri Lanka and staff from the Vatican Museums.

Pope Francis explained that allowing the Holy Spirit to work results in a Church that says ‘yes.’

He noted that this ‘yes’ happens “when a Christian community lives in love, confesses its sins, worships the Lord, forgives offenses, is charitable towards others and manifests love.”

“It feels the obligation of fidelity to the Lord to observe the commandments,” he underscored.

The pontiff also spoke about the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which relates how the Church “went to the outskirts of faith” to proclaim the Gospel after Pentecost.

In his unscripted homily, the Pope said the Holy Spirit first “pushed and created problems” and then “fostered harmony within the Church.”

He explained that although there were disagreements among the first disciples in Jerusalem on whether or not to allow Gentiles into the Church, some believers were open to it because of their love for Jesus.

“There was a ‘no’ Church that said ‘you cannot, no, no, you must not’ and a ‘yes’ Church that said ‘but let’s think about it, let’s be open to this, the Spirit is opening the door to us’,” said Pope Francis.

“The commandments are fulfilled from this ‘yes,’ a community of open doors,” he stated.

The Church teaches that the Holy Spirit is the continual exchange of love between Jesus Christ and God.

The Pope noted that “Jesus asks us to remain in His love.”

He said that that means “carrying a yoke” and is a ‘yes’ that “defends us from the temptation of becoming Puritans, in the etymological sense of the word, to seek a para-evangelical purity and from being a community of ‘no.’”

The pontiff also mentioned James, a Bishop of Jerusalem, who said people “should not impose a yoke on the neck of the disciples that the same fathers were not able to carry.”

“When the service of the Lord becomes such a heavy yoke, the doors of the Christian communities are closed and no one wants to come to the Lord,” he remarked.

In contrast, it is from love “that the observance of his commandments is born and this is the Christian community that says yes.”

“This love leads us to be faithful to the Lord … I will not do this or that because I love the Lord,” he said.

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Pope Francis welcomes Benedict back to Vatican

(CNA/EWTN News).- Benedict XVI has returned to the Vatican after moving to the papal summer household outside of Rome to not interfere with the papal election.

“He is now pleased to return to the Vatican, where he intends to devote himself, as he announced on Feb. 11, to the service of the Church in prayer,” said a Vatican statement released on May 2.

The former Pope was picked up by helicopter at 4:30 p.m. from the grounds of Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence that is located on the edge of a volcanic crater lake, about 15 miles southeast of Rome.

He had been living in the house for two months as a temporary arrangement since he resigned on February 28.

“The former Pope is happy to return to the Vatican because that is the normal situation for him,” said Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Holy See’s press office.

“He will live a normal life, I believe that he can walk and also receive visitors and so on, but that depends on him and how he wants to live his life,” Fr. Lombardi told Vatican Radio.

Benedict XVI arrived at around 4:45 p.m. at the Vatican’s heliport and was greeted by Vatican staff and authorities including Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State.

Also in attendance were Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, the President of the Vatican City State Governorate; Archbishop Angelo Becciu, deputy of the Secretariat of State; Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, who is the State Secretariat’s chief of relations with States; and Bishop Giuseppe Sciacca, the secretary for the Vatican City State government.

From the heliport, Benedict XVI took a car to his permanent home, the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where Pope Francis met him.

After their greeting, the two walked into the chapel of the monastery for a short moment of prayer.

The monastery is located within the Vatican gardens and is a 10-minute walk from the Saint Martha residence where Pope Francis lives.

Renovations to the monastery, which began in Nov. 2012, were recently completed and involved replacing old windows, fixing a problem with humidity in the basement and making repairs to a rooftop terrace.

“It is small but has been well prepared,” Fr. Lombardi commented.

“There is, for example, a study room and a small library and there is also a room for when his brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, comes to visit,” he said.

The monastery also includes a chapel and a choir room.

Benedict XVI will live alongside five other people, including his secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, and the four Memores Domini who lived with him at the Pontifical Household throughout his pontificate.

The Memores Domini are members of a lay association whose members practice obedience, poverty and chastity, and live in a climate of silence and common prayer.

As for the former pontiff’s health, Fr. Lombardi said he is healthy and there is no reason for any “special concern.”

“He is not a young man, he is old and strength slowly goes backwards, but there is no specific illness,” said the Vatican spokesman.

George Weigel: The Bishop of Rome as Christian Radical

The following comes from First Things:

It was a brief greeting to former colleagues. But if you read Pope Francis’ recentletter to the Argentine bishops’ conference closely, you get a glimpse of the man, his convictions, and his vision.

First, the man: Jorge Mario Bergoglio has remained very much himself, rather than adopting what some might deem the pontifical style. Any pope who can write his former colleagues in these terms—“Dear Brothers: I am sending these lines of greeting and also to excuse myself for being unable to attend due to ‘commitments assumed recently’ (sounds good?)”—is a man at home in his own skin, and one likely to remain that way.

Then, the convictions: Pope Francis believes that the Church in Latin America took a decisive step toward a new future in 2007. Then, at the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held at Aparecida in Brazil, the leaders of the Church moved far beyond the “kept” Catholicism of the past—the Catholicism that was “kept” by legal establishment or, more recently, cultural habit—and embraced a robustly Evangelical Catholicism in which, as the pope wrote, “the whole of ministry (is) in a missionary key.”

The move from “kept” Catholicism to Evangelical Catholicism is for everyone, the pope seems convinced. “Kept” Catholicism has no future anywhere, and not just because of aggressive secularism and other corrosive cultural acids. “Kept” Catholicism has no future because it doesn’t merit a future: or, as the pope put it to his former colleagues, “a Church that does not go out, sooner or later gets sick” in the hothouse atmosphere of its own self-absorption, which Francis has also called “self-referentiality.”

When the Church is about itself, rather than the gospel and the invitation to friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Church betrays the gospel and the Lord. How? The “self-referential Church” falls victim to “a kind of narcissism that leads to spiritual worldliness and to sophisticated clericalism,” which in turn are obstacles to what the bishops at Aparecida called “the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”

That joy, Pope Francis quickly added, is “many times united to the Cross.” But the joy that comes from the embrace of the Cross helps the ordained ministers of the Church “to be each day more fruitful, spending ourselves and unraveling ourselves in the service of the holy faithful people of God.” And if the pastors are seen to pick up the Cross and live joyfully in the embrace of the Crucified and Risen Lord, the people of the Church will find the courage to do the same: thus the entire Body of Christ becomes a powerful witness to the truth that it is in self-giving, not self-assertion, that we find happiness.

As for the pope’s vision, Francis seems willing, even eager, to lead a Church that takes risks in boldly proclaiming the gospel. “It is true,” he wrote the bishops of Argentina, that “something can happen” to a Church that “goes out,” just as things can happen to someone who leaves the safety of home: Accidents can happen. But “I wish to say to you frankly,” the pope continued, “that I prefer a thousand times an injured Church than a sick Church,” a risk-taking Church to a Church palsied by self-absorption. Thus the vision toward which this pope “from the end of the earth” is calling the entire Church: all Christ, all gospel, all mission, all the time.

The Bishop of Rome as Christian radical is going to take some getting used to. Expect serious disorientation in those ideological redoubts where the old battles over the now-superseded Church of the Counter-Reformation remain all-consuming (e.g., the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Lefebvrists). Some may find it hard to reconcile Christian radicalism with orthodoxy. But, as I argue inEvangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church, that’s precisely what orthodoxy is: the adventure of radical conversion ordered to mission. The 266th Bishop of Rome would seem to agree.

Something Beautiful by Needtobreathe

“We will all die for Jesus Christ; we willingly die so as to not renounce his holy faith”

The following comes from The Catholic Herald:

Pope Francis is preparing to canonise an estimated 800 Italian laymen killed by Ottoman soldiers in the 15th century. The canonisation service will be on May 12 in St Peter’s Square and it will be the first carried out by the Pontiff since he was elected in early March.

The killing of the martyrs by Ottoman troops, who launched a weeks-long siege of Otranto, a small port town at the most eastern tip of southern Italy, took place in 1480.

When Otranto residents refused to surrender to the Ottoman army, the soldiers were ordered to massacre all males over the age of 15. Many were ordered to convert to Islam or die, but Blessed Antonio Primaldo, a tailor, spoke on the prisoners’ behalf. “We believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God, and for Jesus Christ we are ready to die,” he said, according to Blessed John Paul II, who visited Otranto in 1980 for the 500th anniversary of the martyrs’ deaths.

Primaldo inspired all the other townspeople to take courage, the late Pope said, and to say: “We will all die for Jesus Christ; we willingly die so as to not renounce his holy faith.” There were not “deluded” or “outdated,” Blessed John Paul continued, but “authentic, strong, decisive, consistent men” who loved their city, their families and their faith.

The skulls and other relics of the martyrs currently adorn the walls around the altar of Otranto Cathedral as a memorial to their sacrifice. According to the archdiocese’s website, popular tradition holds that when the soldiers beheaded Primaldo, his body remained standing even as the combatants tried to push him over. Legend has it that the decapitated man stood until the very last prisoner was killed, at which point Primaldo’s body collapsed next to his dead comrades.

In 1771, the Church recognised the validity of the local veneration of Primaldo and his companions and allowed them to be called Blessed. In 2007, retired Pope Benedict XVI formally recognised their martyrdom and, in 2012, he recognised a miracle attributed to their intercession. Martyrs do not need a miracle attributed to their intercession in order to be beatified. However, miracles must be recognised by the Vatican in order for them to become saints.

The miracle involved the late-Poor Clare Sister Francesca Levote. She was suffering from a serious form of cancer but was healed after a pilgrimage to pray before the martyrs’ relics in Otranto in 1980, a few months before Pope John Paul’s visit in October. She died in February 2012 at the age of 85.

In a letter published in December 2012, Archbishop Donato Negro of Otranto said that the martydom of the townnsfolk must represent a “purification of the memory of the Catholic Church and a rooting out of every possible lingering resentment, rancor, resentful policies, every eventual temptation toward hatred and violence, and every presumptuous attitude of religious superiority, religious arrogance, moral and cultural pride.”

Remembering Christian martyrs is an occasion to examine one’s own life and make sure it corresponds with the Gospel call to love and forgive, he added.