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(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis offered greetings and best wishes to those in the Far East and around the world who are preparing to celebrate the lunar New Year later this week, on 28 January.

“My cordial greeting goes out to all their families, with the hope that they might become ever more a school in which is learned respect for others, to communicate with and care for others in a selfless manner,” Pope Francis said at the conclusion of the Angelus on Sunday.

He continued, “May the joy of love be propagated within families, and from there radiate throughout all of society.”

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(Vatican Radio) In an interview published by Spanish language newspaper El País, Pope Francis said he is most concerned with those in the Church – Bishops, priests, nuns, laymen – who are ‘anesthetized,’ rather than those who are asleep. Those who are anesthetized, he said, “sell out to worldliness.” An anesthetized person, he said, “is not in touch with people, he protects himself against reality.” When such people are in the Church, he said, they “should pack [their] bags and retire.”

Once again, the Holy Father covered a wide range of topics in a newspaper interview, touching again on subjects that are near and dear to his heart – including the “world war” currently being waged “in pieces”; the problem of migration, which involves both welcoming and integrating migrants; the problems of embracing ideologies; and the problems of corruption, especially in the modern world, which worships the “god of money.”

Pope Francis was asked in particular about current world events, including the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. “I think we must wait and see,” he said with regard to the new US administration. “I don’t like to get ahead of myself nor judge people prematurely. We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion.” He warned against premature reactions: “Being afraid or rejoicing beforehand, because of something that might happen, is, in my view, unwise,” he said.

The Pope had words of praise for his successor, Paul VI, whom he called an unappreciated martyr. He also praised his collaborators in the Roman curia, saying some of them are true saints. The Pope also spoke at some length about what he called the “middle class of sanctity”: mothers, fathers, families, ordinary people, with their sins and their virtues, who strive to lead a Christian life.

The interview with Pope Francis also touched on the Vatican’s role as a mediator in diplomatic conflicts, with the Holy Father emphasizing the importance of dialogue. The Church’s relations with various countries, including Spain, Venezuela and Colombia, and China, also came up in the conversation.

At the close of the interview, asked about what he hopes for from the conclave that will elect his successor, Pope Francis said, “I want it to be Catholic.” He said he wasn’t sure if he would see that election – a reference to the possibility of resigning – or if God would “carry [him] away” before that.

Pope Francis concluded the interview saying “The Lord is good, and hasn’t taken away my good humour.”

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Washington D.C., Jan 22, 2017 / 06:17 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For two Catholic bishops in Virginia, the execution of a man convicted of brutally killing a family of four was a time to reflect on God’s mercy.

“Our Creator, who made us out of love for love, has dominion over all life,” Bishop Francis DiLorenzo of Richmond and Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington said in a joint statement Jan. 18.

“As children of this loving, merciful God we are led to a profound respect for every human life, from its very beginning until its natural end.”

They said that the death penalty should be abandoned because the state can protect itself in other ways.

“Our broken world cries out for justice, not the additional violence or vengeance the death penalty will exact,” Bishop DiLorenzo and Bishop Burbidge said.

The state of Virginia on Wednesday executed by lethal injection Ricky Gray, age 39.

He and his nephew went on a killing spree in January 2006, murdering seven people in a six day period, CNN reports.

He was convicted of killing a family of four who left their front door open on New Year’s Day 2006. The family had been beaten, bound, and repeatedly stabbed. Their house was then set on fire.

The death sentence concerned the murders of 9-year-old Stella Harvey and her 4-year-old sister Ruby. He was also sentenced to life in prison for killing their parents.  

Gray had issued a public apology in the days before his execution, saying, “I’m sorry they had to be a victim of my despair.”

“Remorse is not a deep enough word for how I feel. I know my words can't bring anything back, but I continuously feel horrible for the circumstances that I put them through. I robbed them from a lifelong supply of joy,” he said in an audio message posted on a website advocating his clemency.

Bishop DiLorenzo and Bishop Burbidge also reflected on the victims.

“We again express profound sorrow and offer our continued prayers for all victims of violence, whose lives have been brutally cut short, and their loved ones, whose grief continues,” the bishops said.

“We pray for a change of heart and a spirt of remorse and conversion on the part of the perpetrators of this violence and ask God to give all of us the grace to work for peace and respect for all life in our communities and our Commonwealth.”

Gray also confessed to the November 2005 killing of his own wife.

His attorneys had filed constitutional challenges with the U.S. Supreme Court against the execution, citing the failure of the lethal drug cocktail to make prisoners unconscious during executions in the states of Alabama, Arizona, Ohio and Oklahoma. The Supreme Court denied a stay of execution.

Lawyers had also appealed his sentence on the grounds that jurors did not receive a clear explanation of the severe abuse that shaped his life and his use of PCP and the drug’s potential to cause psychosis.

Gray’s nephew, Ray Dandridge, is serving a life sentence due to other killings.

 

 

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Vatican City, Jan 22, 2017 / 08:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In a new interview published Saturday, Pope Francis said he will wait to see what U.S. President Donald J. Trump does before making any judgments, emphasizing God’s own patience with him and his faults.

In an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais Jan. 20, the same day as the U.S. presidential inauguration, Pope Francis said he doesn’t like to get ahead of himself “or judge people prematurely.”

“We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion. But being afraid or rejoicing beforehand because of something that might happen is, in my view, quite unwise. It would be like prophets predicting calamities or windfalls that will not be either,” he said.

“We will see. We will see what he does and will judge.” The world is so upside down, that it needs a fixed point, grounded firmly in reality: “what did you do, what did you decide, how do you move. That is what I prefer to wait and see.”

Asked if he wasn’t worried about things he had heard about Trump, Francis responded again that he is waiting. “God waited so long for me, with all my sins…” he said.

In the wide-ranging interview, the Pope was questioned about issues ranging from immigration to economics to Vatican diplomacy to the Gospel, among other things.

On the issue of immigration Francis was clear about his position, that “everyone does what they can or what they want. It is a very hard judgment.”

The most important thing is that those in dire need are helped and rescued, he said. After that we should welcome migrants and refugees and help them to integrate into their new country.

In the context of 1930s Germany, where the people were “in crisis” and looking for a charismatic leader, someone who could give them a clear identity, “we all know what happened,” he said. But what is important is that people did not talk to one another, there was no conversation.

“Yes,” borders can be controlled, he said. Countries have a right to control “who comes and who goes, and those countries at risk – from terrorism or such things – have even more the right to control them more, but no country has the right to deprive its citizens of the possibility to talk with their neighbors.”

Asked about Vatican diplomacy and its image, including the public thanks of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro on the one hand, and the parties that criticize the Vatican’s interference, on the other, the Pope said that he asks the Lord “that he give me the grace of not taking any measure for the sake of image.”

“Honesty, service, those are the criteria.” Mistakes are sometimes made, your image suffers, “but it doesn’t matter if there was goodwill. History will judge afterwards,” he said.

For him, he said, the clear, guiding principle for both pastoral action and Vatican diplomacy is that they are “mediators, rather than intermediaries.”

“We build bridges, not walls. What is the difference between a mediator and an intermediary?” he said. An intermediary is someone who enters a business agreement, renders a service and then is compensated, “and rightly so, because it is his job.”

The mediator, on the other hand, “is the one who wants to serve both parties and wants both parties to win even if he loses,” the Pope said. “Vatican diplomacy must be a mediator, not an intermediary. If, throughout history, it has sometimes maneuvered or managed a meeting that filled its pockets, that was a very serious sin.”

“The mediator builds bridges that are not for him, but rather for others to cross.”

Asked if his changes to the Vatican, sometimes criticized both by the more traditional sectors of the church and by the more progressive, are a “revolution of normalcy,” or already contained in the “Gospel’s essence,” as he has said, Pope Francis responded simply that he is a “sinner and not always successful.”

“I try – I don't know if I succeed – to do what the Gospel says. That is what I try,” he said.

“The true heroes of the Church are the saints. That is, those men and women that devoted their lives to make the Gospel a reality,” he said. “The saints are the specific examples of the Gospel in daily life!”

With the emphasis on going out to the peripheries, how would Francis respond to those Catholics that feel that he ignores the people who have remained faithful to the Church and her teachings, was also questioned.

“I know that those who feel comfortable within a Church structure that doesn't ask too much of them or who have attitudes that protect them from too much contact are going to feel uneasy with any change, with any proposal coming from the Gospel,” he said.

“The novelty of the Gospel however astonishes because it is essentially scandalous,” he continued. “Saint Paul tells us about the scandal of the cross, the scandal of the Son of God become man. But the evangelical essence is scandalous by those days’ criteria. By any worldly criteria, it is an outrageous essence.”

Once questioned by a German journalist about why he never talks about the middle class, “those who pay their taxes…” Francis said he thinks that maybe he is always talking about the middle class, just without calling it that.

“I use a term coined by the French novelist Malègue, who talks about ‘the middle class of sanctity,’” he said.

“I am always talking about parents, grandparents, nurses, the people who live to serve others, who raise their kids, who work... Those people are tremendously saintly!” he said.

“And they are also the ones who carry the Church onward: the ones that earn their living with dignity, that raise their children, that bury their dead, that care for their elders, instead of putting them into an old people's home: that is our saintly middle class.”

From an economic point of view, the middle class is vanishing more and more, he said. But “the father, the mother, who celebrate their family, with their sins and their virtues, the grandfather, the grandmother,” he continued. “The family. At the center. That is ‘the middle class of sanctity.’”

A final comment reflected that Francis seems to be a very happy Pope. “The Lord is good and hasn’t taken away my good humor,” he said.

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