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(Vatican Radio)  Pope Francis has asked for prayers for the people of Iraq, also appealing for all in Mosul to “engage fully with the civil protection forces, as an imperative and urgent obligation.”

The Pope’s appeal came at the end of his weekly General Audience in St. Peter’s Square in words to a delegation from the Iraqi Supervisory Board.

The interreligious group was accompanied by Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

Pope Francis said, “The richness of the dear Iraqi nation lies exactly in this mosaic, which represents unity in diversity, strength in union, and prosperity in harmony.”

He encouraged efforts toward interreligious harmony and asked for prayers for this end.

“I invite all to pray that Iraq may find peace, unity, and prosperity in reconciliation and in harmony among its different ethnic and religious components.”

The Holy Father then turned his thoughts to the people of western Mosul and those forced to leave the area in search of security.

“My thoughts go to the civilian populations trapped in the western districts of Mosul and to the people displaced by war, to whom I feel united in suffering through prayer and spiritual closeness. While expressing deep sorrow for the victims of the bloody conflict, I renew to all the appeal to engage fully with the civil protection forces, as an imperative and urgent obligation.”

Pope Francis also invited pilgrims from Iraq and other Arab-speaking countries to look to Mary, the Mother of God, and follow her model of faith.

“Like her, we are called to live a life sustained by faith and to look with hope to the completion of the Will of God in our lives. May God bless you!”

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(Vatican Radio)  Pope Francis has sent a message to participants in the European Symposium on Young People, encouraging them to reflect “on the challenges of evangelization”.

The event, entitled “He walked by their side (Lk 24:15) - Accompanying young people to freely respond to Christ's call”, is taking place in Barcelona, Spain on 28-31 March.

In the message signed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Pope Francis encouraged young people to “conduct a reflection on the challenges of evangelization and on the accompaniment of young people, so that – through dialogue and encounter and as living members of the family of Christ – young people may be enthusiastic bearers of the joy of the Gospel in all areas.”

The Holy Father invoked the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary upon the Symposium’s participants and imparted his Apostolic Blessing.

The Barcelona Symposium is promoted by the Council of European Catholic Bishops' Conferences (CCEE) in collaboration with the Spanish Catholic Bishops' Conference and the Archdiocese of Barcelona.

Among Church leaders taking part are Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, Archbishop Juan José Omella of Barcelona, and Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski of Krakow.

Young people will also have the opportunity to listen to the reflections and testimonies of several national directors along with those of other young people.

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(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has appealed for a concerted effort to protect Iraqi civilians who are victims of the ongoing bloody war in their nation and he prayed in particular for those who are trapped in the embattled city of Mosul.

Iraqi forces backed by U.S.-led coalition air strikes are fighting to clear Islamic State militants from Iraq's second city where the US-led coalition allegedly had a role in a bombing which killed over 200 people..

The Pope’s appeal came at the end of his catechesis during the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square.

Expressing deep pain for the victims of the bloody conflict in Iraq, Pope Francis appealed to all to  make every possible effort to protect civilians, which he said is an  “imperative and urgent” obbligation. 

Encouraging the Iraqi people to pursue a path of unity within respect for diversity, the Pope also asked for prayers for reconciliation and harmony between the different ethnic groups that make up the population. 
    
In his catechesis the Pope encouraged Christians to always put their trust in God’s word, even at those times when hope seems humanly impossible.

Reflecting on St. Paul’s Letter to Romans in which he presents Abraham not only as our father in faith, but also as our father in hope, Francis said the reading helps us put the strong tie that exists between faith and hope into focus.

He said that hoping against hope, Abraham trusted in God’s promise that, despite his old age and that of Sarah his wife, he would become the father of many nations.  

“Great hope, he said, is rooted in faith”, that’s why it is able to go beyond all human expectations.

“We must all pray to God, open our hearts and He will teach us what hope is” he said. 

Reminding those present that  God promises to set us  free from sin and death by the power of Christ’s resurrection, Pope Francis urged the faithful to place their certainties not so much in their own capacities, but in the hope that derives from God’s promise of life.  

Faith, he said, teaches us, to hope against hope by putting our own trust in God’s word even at those times when hope seems humanly impossible.  

The Pope concluded urging believers to be confirmed in faith and hope during this Lenten journey to Easter, and to accept the promise of new life given us in the Lord’s resurrection.

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Philadelphia, Pa., Mar 29, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has announced a new initiative on marriage and family life: a three-year course which will be offered to both the clergy and lay people throughout its parishes.

“There is a serious need to shift our previous approach to marriage and family life which ignores the consequences of poor catechesis and the lack of personal encounter to a more evangelical and relational approach,” the archdioceses said in a press release.

The extensive program, titled Remain in My Love, will direct its focus at a different target audience every year for three years. The outreach will begin in May 2017 and will end in December 2019.

The first year will specifically address the staff members of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Center, and will focus on the theme of “renewing our mission in service to married couples and families.”

“These gatherings will help us rediscover our shared mission to support, heal, and strengthen the married couples and families who have been entrusted to our care in the local Church of Philadelphia,” reads the archdiocesan website.

“As the pastoral arm of his leadership and ministry in the service of all the Archdiocese, a reinvigorated…understanding of marriage and family life becomes a lens through which to encourage the same understanding in our parishes and institutions.”

Year two will begin in January 2018, and will cater to the staff of archdiocesan institutions such as parishes or schools. Their theme will focus on “renewing our mission of pastoral care of married couples and families.”

“It will be designed as an opportunity for growth and transformation as well as mutual support, encouragement and discussion fueled by study materials, dynamic presentations, and beautiful videos.”

The third and final year is aimed at all married couples and families within the archdiocese, beginning in January 2019. This program will highlight the goal of “rediscovering the mission of marriage and the family.”

“Married couples and families of the Archdiocese will be invited to encounter the splendor of what Christ has revealed about marriage and family life through large and small group gatherings.”

Each year is made up of three sessions, covering theological material such as the sacramentality of marriage, the goods of marriage, and the family as the domestic church. The classes will underscore the institution of marriage, the threats to marriage, and the mission of the family in the world.

In addition, the participants will also be involved with a 12-session small group class called CanaVox. These small group sessions will read and discuss relevant topics about marriage and the family through Church documents and current events.  

“The project, for all three years, moves in two directions, inviting a committed investment on the part of all.”

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is hoping that this new program will reach out to couples after their marriage, as a continuation of the conversation that marriage prep started. Pope Francis has also recently spoken out about marriage, calling for better marriage prep, and pointing to the need for a “new catechumenate in preparation for marriage.”

Remain in My Love will aim to “reinvigorate our understanding, practices and celebrations of Christian marriage and family life,” to “every member of the clergy, lay faithful, and to every parish and institution” within the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

More information about Remain in My Love can be found at www.archphila.org/remain

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Vatican City, Mar 29, 2017 / 04:56 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With the battle for major ISIS strongholds heating up in Iraq, Pope Francis has voiced his closeness to the country, praying for the safety of people on the ground, particularly civilians caught in the crosshairs of the fighting.

“My thoughts go out to civilians trapped in the western districts of Mosul and displaced because of the war, to whom I feel united in suffering, through prayer and spiritual closeness,” he said during his March 29 general audience.

“While expressing deep sorrow for the victims of the bloody conflict, I renew to all the call to engage with every effort in the protection of civilians as an imperative and urgent requirement.”

During the audience, which took place in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope greeted a delegation of Iraqi Superintendents representing various religious groups accompanied by the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran.  

“The richness of the beloved Iraqi nation lies in this mosaic which is unity in diversity, strength in union, prosperity in harmony,” he said, encouraging them to go forward on this same path.

Francis also asked for prayers for Iraq that they might find reconciliation and harmony and “peace, unity and prosperity” among their different ethnic and religious groups.

His appeal followed a sharp rise this week in the number of reported civilian deaths in U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria as ground forces backed by the strikes are closing in on two of the Islamic State's main urban strongholds: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

According to the Washington Post, the reports have fueled accusations that the U.S. and its partners may not be acting with sufficient regard for the safety of civilians.

During his main address to pilgrims, Pope Francis continued his catechesis on the theme of hope, drawing attention to the close connection that exists between the virtue of hope and the virtue of faith.

“Great hope is rooted in faith, and as such is able to go beyond all hope,” he said, “because it is not based on our word, but the Word of God…When God promises, he accomplishes what he promises.”

“I'd like to ask you a question,” the Pope said. “We, all of us, are we convinced of this? Do we believe that God loves us and that everything he has promised us will be brought to fruition?”

All we have to do is have an open heart, and God will teach us how to hope and will do “miraculous things.” The only price, he said, is to “open our hearts to faith and he will do the rest.”

To illustrate the point, Pope Francis drew on the Old Testament story of Abraham and his wife Sarah, quoting the words of St. Paul in the Letter to Romans, that Abraham “believed, hoping against hope.”

Despite the advanced age of he and his wife Sarah, Abraham, “did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body as dead (he was almost a hundred years old) and the dead womb of Sarah,” who was barren.

We are also called to live this experience and example of faith, Francis said, adding that Abraham, “who, even before the evidence of a reality that seems destined for death, trusts in God, ‘fully convinced that what he had promised he was also able to bring to completion.’”

Francis said this is a “paradox,” yet at the same time is the strongest element of our hope. A hope, he said, which is “founded on a promise which from the human point of view seems uncertain and unpredictable, but which does not fail even in the face of death.”

“The God who reveals himself to Abraham is the God who saves, the God who has come out of desperation and death, a God who calls to life,” he said. “In the story of Abraham all becomes a hymn to God who frees and regenerates.”

And we recognize and celebrate the fulfillment of God’s promises in the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter, he explained.

Hope, then, is not something we can possess based on “human reassurance,” but “it occurs where there is no hope, where there's nothing left to hope for, just as it did for Abraham, in front of his imminent death and sterility of his wife Sarah.”

“Dear brothers and sisters, today we ask the Lord for the grace to remain founded not so much on our safety, on our own strength, but on the hope drawn by the promise of God, like true children of Abraham,” he concluded.

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Washington D.C., Mar 29, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Supreme Court case about pension plans of religious hospitals could decide something much bigger – whether religious groups are legally part of churches.

“There’s really a big problem if you decide ‘church’ is sort of narrowly ‘worship’,” said Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

“That’s really something that a church should be deciding, whether they just worship or whether they go out and serve other people outside of the four walls of the sanctuary,” Rassbach told CNA.

The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments in Advocate Health Care Network v. Stapleton, a consolidation of three cases involving the pension plans of religious hospitals like Advocate and St. Peter’s HealthCare System in New Jersey.

The employers are looking to move the plans, regulated like other plans of for-profit corporations, into a religious category exempt from some of those regulations.

The law in question, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, regulates pension plans of for-profit corporations, requiring the employers to hold an additional amount of funds in reserve. Setting up these reserves could be cost-prohibitive especially for community hospitals, some of whom “are not going to be able to do that,” Rassbach said.

“If Advocate and hundreds of other religious hospitals around the country were forced to follow for-profit rules, money currently used to serve the poor and inner city communities would be lost and many would be forced to shut down,” the Becket Fund argued.

Congress has recognized a religious exemption for pension plans of churches, and entities like St. Peter’s Hospital in New Jersey applied for this exemption after operating their pension plans according to the federal regulations for years. The plaintiffs bringing the suit, employees of the health care networks, claim their pension plan agreements are being unfairly altered.

The religious exemption applies to plans “established” and “maintained” by churches. In the case of St. Peter’s HealthCare, decided by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the court ruled that since the Catholic Church (through a diocese or parish) did not “establish” the pension plans, they were not eligible for the ERISA religious exemption, even if a “church agency” like a religious order set up the plan.

St. Peter’s is a non-profit health care system sponsored by the Diocese of Metuchen. The court conceded that it has Catholic ties, like daily Mass offered at the hospital, Catholic devotionals present there, and many board members who are appointed by the local bishop.

“But can a church agency, in addition to maintaining an exempt church plan, also establish such a plan? The District Court concluded that it cannot. We agree,” the appeals court decided.

It also conceded that for years, plans set up by “church agencies” were recognized by the courts as religiously exempt: “In the decades following the current church plan definition’s enactment in 1980, various courts have assumed that entities that are not themselves churches, but have sufficiently strong ties to churches, can establish exempt church plans.”

“However,” the court added, “a new wave of litigation, of which this case is a part, has sprung up in the past few years and has presented an argument not previously considered by courts – that the actual words of the church plan definition preclude this result.” New lawsuits are shedding light on the “plain text” of ERISA that churches and only churches can set up pension plans that meet the religious exemption, the court said.

There are around 100 similar lawsuits involving religious hospitals – many of which are Catholic, Rassbach noted. New litigation is “taking from the poor to give to the rich class-action lawyers,” he argued.

Not only did the courts recognize that these religious entities were eligible for the pension exemption, but the IRS did as well, he maintained.

This question was raised in Monday’s oral arguments, where Justice Stephen Breyer pressed James Feldman, representing the respondents suing the health care networks, on whether orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor should be recognized as part of churches.

Justice Breyer asked “if it's a legitimate organization like, let's say the Little Sisters of the Poor, really affiliated with the church,” if they would be recognized as part of a church.

The U.S. bishops’ conference and religious freedom legal groups like the Becket Fund and Alliance Defending Freedom have sided with the health care networks in the case, saying that it is a religious freedom issue.

In their amicus brief siding with the St. Peter’s HealthCare and Dignity Health, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argued that while Catholic health care providers may not be officially part of a church or parish structure, their plans should meet the religious exemptions under ERISA.

“Indeed, charity has always been a core component of the Catholic Church’s activities, ‘as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel’,” the USCCB said, quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Deus Caritas Est.”

This charity is lived out “through myriad Catholic ministries” like health care providers, they added, which should be treated as part of the Church.

And these charities may or may not be directly affiliated with Catholic dioceses and parishes or with the Holy See, they continued, “yet, as a matter of Catholic theology, the various ministries that the Church recognizes as Catholic ministries are all part of the Church” even though “they may be (and often are) civilly, structurally, and financially independent entities.”

These employers must be given a religious exemption, the bishops’ conference added, saying that “long before” the ERISA regulations were enacted for pension plans, “Catholic charitable organizations provided their workers with generous benefits.”

“In recognition of that reality (which is not unique to the Catholic Church), and to avoid imposing potentially crushing new obligations on such organizations, Congress has long exempted the benefit plans of church-affiliated organizations from the sometimes burdensome requirements of ERISA,” they continued.

And the Court must recognize this, they concluded, or this could bring about more problems in determining which religious groups are treated as part of a church.

 

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