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(Vatican Radio)  On the last day of his three day visit to Armenia, Pope Francis participated Sunday in the Divine Liturgy celebrated by his Oriental Orthodox host, Catholicos of all Armenians Karekin II. In a discourse at the conclusion of the celebration, Pope Francis spoke of his “already unforgettable” visit and prayed that the two Churches “follow God’s call to full communion and hasten to it.” 

Thanking Catholicos Karekin for his hospitality, Pope Francis said, “you have opened to me the doors of your home and we have experienced ‘how good and pleasant it is when brothers live in unity’.” 

“We have met, we have embraced as brothers, we have prayed together and shared the gifts, hopes and concerns of the Church of Christ.  We have felt as one her beating heart, and we believe and experience that the Church is one,” Pope Francis said.

Citing Saints Bartholomew and Thaddeus “who first proclaimed the Gospel in these lands” and “Saints Peter and Paul who gave their lives for the Lord in Rome,”  the pontiff said they “surely rejoice to see our affection and our tangible longing for full communion.”

Francis prayed the Holy Spirit to “make all believers one heart and soul; may he come to re-establish us in unity” and, “may the cause of our scandal be dissolved” by God’s love, “above all the lack of unity among Christ’s disciples.”

Calling for peace in the Armenian Church and “complete” communion, Pope Francis prayed for “an ardent desire for unity” among Christians.  But such unity, he stressed, must not mean “the submission of one to the other, or assimilation, but rather the acceptance of all the gifts that God has given to each.”

Concluding, Pope Francis urged the faithful to “listen to the voices of the humble and poor, of the many victims of hatred who suffered and gave their lives for the faith” and to young people “who seek a future free of past divisions.”

From this holy place, the Pope said, “may a radiant light shine forth once more… and to the light of faith which has illumined these lands from the time of Saint Gregory…may there be joined the light of the love that forgives and reconciles.”

Below, please find the English translation of Pope Francis’ discourse:

Your Holiness, Dear Bishops,

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

            At the end of this greatly-desired visit, one already unforgettable for me, I join my gratitude to the Lord with the great hymn of praise and thanksgiving that rose from this altar.  Your Holiness, in these days you have opened to me the doors of your home, and we have experienced “how good and pleasant it is when brothers live in unity” (Ps 133:1).  We have met, we have embraced as brothers, we have prayed together and shared the gifts, hopes and concerns of the Church of Christ.  We have felt as one her beating heart, and we believe and experience that the Church is one.  “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope… one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4-6).  With great joy we can make our own these words of the Apostle Paul!  Our meeting comes under the aegis of the holy Apostles whom we have encountered.  Saints Bartholomew and Thaddeus, who first proclaimed the Gospel in these lands, and Saints Peter and Paul who gave their lives for the Lord in Rome and now reign with Christ in heaven, surely rejoice to see our affection and our tangible longing for full communion.  For all this, I thank the Lord, for you and with you: Park astutsò! (Glory to God!).

            During this Divine Liturgy, the solemn chant of the Trisagion rose to heaven, acclaiming God’s holiness.  May abundant blessings of the Most High fill the earth through the intercession of the Mother of God, the great saints and doctors, the martyrs, especially the many whom you canonized last year in this place.  May “the Only Begotten who descended here” bless our journey.  May the Holy Spirit make all believers one heart and soul; may he come to re-establish us in unity.  For this I once more invoke the Holy Spirit, making my own the splendid words that are part of your Liturgy.  Come, Holy Spirit, you “who intercede with ceaseless sighs to the merciful Father, you who watch over the saints and purify sinners”, bestow on us your fire of love and unity, and “may the cause of our scandal be dissolved by this love” (Gregory of Narek, Book of Lamentations, 33, 5), above all the lack of unity among Christ’s disciples.

            May the Armenian Church walk in peace and may the communion between us be complete.  May an ardent desire for unity rise up in our hearts, a unity that must not be “the submission of one to the other, or assimilation, but rather the acceptance of all the gifts that God has given to each.  This will reveal to the entire world the great mystery of salvation accomplished by Christ the Lord through the Holy Spirit” (Greeting at the Divine Liturgy, Patriarchal Church of Saint George, Istanbul, 30 November 2014).

            Let us respond to the appeal of the saints, let us listen to the voices of the humble and poor, of the many victims of hatred who suffered and gave their lives for the faith.  Let us pay heed to the younger generation, who seek a future free of past divisions.  From this holy place may a radiant light shine forth once more, and to the light of faith, which has illumined these lands from the time of Saint Gregory, your Father in the Gospel, may there be joined the light of the love that forgives and reconciles.

            Just as on Easter morning the Apostles, for all their hesitations and uncertainties, ran towards the place of the resurrection, drawn by the blessed dawn of new hope (cf. Jn 20:3-4), so too on this holy Sunday may we follow God’s call to full communion and hasten towards it.

            Now, Your Holiness, in the name of God, I ask you to bless me, to bless me and the Catholic Church, and to bless this our path towards full unity.                               

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United States first lady Michelle Obama is visiting Africa starting Sunday with daughters Sasha and Malia and her mother as part of an effort to promote girls' education, her office said.

The six-day trip will include visits to Morocco and Liberia. She will also visit Spain. The trip will highlight the work of Let Girls Learn, a U.S. government initiative launched by U.S. President Barack Obama and the first lady in 2015.

That project is part of "a U.S. government effort to address the barriers that keep over 62 million girls around the world out of school, particularly adolescent girls," the first lady's chief of staff, Tina Tchen, told reporters on a conference call.

Michelle Obama will be joined by actresses Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto in Morocco, where they will talk to adolescent girls on the challenges they face in getting an education, her office said.

In Liberia, she will visit a U.S. Peace Corps training facility and a school along with Liberian President Ellen Johansson Sirleaf, Africa's first female elected head of state and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Michelle Obama's interest in education for young girls was heightened after Islamist militant group Boko Haram seized 276 girls from their school in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, in April 2014. She highlighted their plight through a Twitter hashtag, #BringBackOurGirls.

"This is a unique trip in the sense that the first lady is going to three different regions that are important to the United States: Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Europe," Ben Rhodes, Assistant to the President, told reporters.

(Reuters)

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Yerevan, Armenia, Jun 26, 2016 / 01:58 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis reiterated his desire for full communion with the Armenian Apostolic Church during its divine liturgy on Sunday, the final major event of his three-day visit to the Caucasus nation.

Delivering his address after the homily of Catholicos Karekin II, who presided over the liturgy, the Pope also asked the supreme leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church to bless him, the Catholic Church, and “this our path towards full unity.”

“We have met, we have embraced as brothers, we have prayed together and shared the gifts, hopes and concerns of the Church of Christ,” the pontiff said. “We have felt as one her beating heart, and we believe and experience that the Church is one.”

“May the Armenian Church walk in peace and may the communion between us be complete.”  

Pope Francis attended the June 26 divine liturgy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, after privately celebrating Mass in the morning. The liturgy was held out of doors in the Saint Tiridates square of the Etchmiadzin Apostolic Palace.

The meeting between the Pope and Karekin, Francis said, was under the auspices of the apostles – Bartholomew and Thaddeus, “who first proclaimed the Gospel” in Armenia, and “Saints Peter and Paul who gave their lives for the Lord in Rome and now reign with Christ in heaven, surely rejoice to see our affection and our tangible longing for full communion.”

“For all this, I thank the Lord, for you and with you: Park astutsò! (Glory to God!).”

The Pope referenced the prayers of the day's liturgy, such as the solemn Trisagion chant, and the invocation of the Holy Spirit.

“May abundant blessings of the Most High fill the earth through the intercession of the Mother of God, the great saints and doctors, the martyrs, especially the many whom you canonized last year in this place,” he said.

Citing the words of St. Gregory of Narek, he went on to pray to the Holy Spirit for unity, especially “among Christ’s disciples.”

Francis added that this unity should not be one of submission or assimilation, “but rather the acceptance of all the gifts that God has given to each.”

“Let us respond to the appeal of the saints, let us listen to the voices of the humble and poor, of the many victims of hatred who suffered and gave their lives for the faith,” Pope Francis said. “Let us pay heed to the younger generation, who seek a future free of past divisions.”

Just as the Apostles rushed toward the place of Jesus' resurrection on Easter, despite their “hesitations and uncertainties,” the Pope said, “so too on this holy Sunday may we follow God’s call to full communion and hasten towards it.”

Pope Francis concluded by asking Karekin to bless him, to bless the Catholic Church, and “to bless this our path towards full unity.”

Earlier, in his homily for the divine liturgy, Catholicos Karekin II expressed his gratitude for Pope Francis' “brotherly visit” to Armenia.

The three-day visit with “our spiritual brother, Pope Francis,” he said, “reconfirmed that the Holy Church of Christ is one in the spreading of the gospel of Christ in the world.”

This includes caring for creation, “standing against common problems, and in the vital mission of the salvation of man who is the crown and glory of God’s creation.”

Karekin II also spoke on the challenges faced today against the faith, such as secularism, the distortion of spiritual and ethical values, and the shaking of the family structure.

Temptations against faith in God occur both amid hardships and amid “times of wealth and lavishness, when they are disengaged with the concerns of those who long for daily bread and are in pain and suffering,” he said.

“Faith is put to the test by extremism and other kinds of ideologies; xenophobia, addictions, passions and self-centred profits.”

“The root of evil in modern life is in trying to build a world without God, to construe the laws and commandments of God which bring forward economic, political, social, environmental and other problems, that day by day deepen and threaten the natural way of life.”

Catholicos Karekin concluded his homily reiterating his appreciation for Pope Francis' visit.

“We and our people will always pray for you, beloved brother, and for your efforts made towards peace and prosperity of humanity and towards the advancement of the Church of Christ,” he said.

“May God give you strength, bless and keep firm our Churches in love and collaboration and may He grant us new opportunities for witness of brotherhood.”

Pope Francis' June 24-26 to Armenia was organized following the invitation of Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, Karekin II, the nation's civil authorities, and the Catholic Church.

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Washington D.C., Jun 26, 2016 / 05:19 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholics in America today need to find ways to engage the culture with truth, and avoid “beige Catholicism” that seeks to be dominated by the culture, Bishop Robert Barron said Thursday.

“Beige Catholicism,” the bishop said, is the “dominance of the prevailing culture over Catholicism,” where Catholics are “too culturally accommodating” and “excessively apologetic.”

Bishop Barron is an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

He delivered the keynote address at a conference on “Catholic Thought and Human Flourishing,” hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. on June 23. The conference was part of a series of events studying the influences of religion on the “roots of human flourishing.”

The purpose of his address, Bishop Barron said, was to propose a “new model for Church-culture dialogue” different from the “one-way quality of the conversation” prevalent today. Under this model of “beige Catholicism,” he noted, “the world sets the agenda for the Church.”

But the proper response to this is not a Church “doomed to a sectarian retreat” from the world, the bishop insisted.

Instead, he suggested, “the question is not whether the Church ought to engage in a dialogue with the wider culture, but rather, how?” And for this, the Church can look to the centuries of saints who successfully dialogued with the culture of their day while still proclaiming Jesus Christ, he said, giving examples like St. Paul and St. Augustine.

The saints did not fall into the modern trap of letting particular worldly experiences “measure doctrine,” he said. Rather, they had a Christo-centric dialogue where, as St. Paul wrote in his epistle to the Colossians, “in Him [Jesus] all things were created, things visible and invisible” and “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”

Furthermore, the Church must identify what is bad with the culture and, like St. Augustine did with “the corrupt society of ancient Rome,” respond with “honest and unambiguous opposition,” Bishop Barron said.

St. Augustine “named the sins of the Roman social order and proposed an alternative, what he called the ‘civitas dei,’ an order predicated upon the worship of the true God,” he continued.

However, he added, the assimilating Church should also be “eager to take in and take up what it can from the culture.”

“St. Paul told us that in Christ’s light, we should test every spirit, rejecting what is bad, retaining what is good,” the bishop explained. And the Church in assimilating “doesn’t simply absorb” the “positive features of society,” but “rather, it elevates them and perfects them, in accord with the great Catholic principles.”

How then can the Church dialogue with American culture, Bishop Barron asked, assimilating what is good and rejecting what is bad?

It must identify the problems with the mainstream culture – an excessive individualism, a flawed notion of freedom, and the “privatization of religion,” he said.

The individualism affects America so that the “common good remains unexplored and unarticulated,” and thus “we do tend to lose our corporate social identity and a shared sense of moral direction.”

There is also a flawed understanding of freedom today “as spontaneous personal choice and self-determination,” he said. This differs from the traditional understanding of “freedom for excellence,” which is the “disciplining of desire” so that doing good becomes “possible, and then effortless.”

Also, today’s culture suffers from the “privatization of religion,” he added, noting that “authentic Christianity can never be privatized” and that all areas of life belong to God. The Church “certainly doesn’t absent itself” from the public square, he insisted.

What can the Church find good in American culture? Pope St. John Paul II set an example of this when he praised the Western human rights tradition, Bishop Barron said.

The Pope did not endorse the modern belief of human rights as grounded in “desire,” he explained. Rather, he grounded human rights in “every individual” being “a subject of inviolable dignity and worth, and from this identity flow rights and a claim to justice.”

In taking the existing human rights tradition and elevating it, Pope John Paul II was “transforming water into wine” in “assimilating a key feature of secular culture into the organic life of the Church,” Bishop Barron said.

Another positive element of American society is its “limited government carefully structured” with “checks and balances,” he said, which opposes the anti-biblical “theory of perfectibility” that man can be perfected in society. The biblical belief that law and justice come from God fueled both the emancipation movement and the civil rights movement, he said.

Figures like President Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also spoke out against injustices of their time using biblical language and quoting figures like St. Thomas Aquinas.

In doing so, Bishop Barron said, they were not trying “to impose a sectarian vision on the nation. Rather, “each creatively and non-aggressively introduced his most deeply-felt religious convictions into the public forum.”

In the same sense, he said, the Church is entering the public forum in a “missionary” spirit to dialogue with it, “to make the world more like the Church.”

 

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