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Vatican Weekend for March 4th, 2017 features a report on Pope Francis’ general audience on Ash Wednesday, a leading Franciscan updates us on the situation in South Sudan, a nation the Pope said once again that he wishes to visit plus  two reflections to mark the Lenten season.

Listen to this program produced and presented by Susy Hodges: 

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Vatican Weekend for March 5th, 2017 features our weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel reading, “There’s more in the Sunday Gospel than Meets the Eye,” plus our resident Vatican watcher Joan Lewis reviews the past week’s events in the Vatican.

Listen to this program produced and presented by Susy Hodges:  

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(Vatican Radio)  The Director of the Holy See Press Office, Greg Burke, said Friday that Pope Francis will hold an audience with the heads of State and government of the European Union on March 24, 2017.

The EU leaders will be in Rome to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome.

Their audience with Pope Francis is to take place in the Sala Regia of the Apostolic Palace on the eve of a summit marking the EU’s founding treaty.

The Holy Father previously addressed EU leaders last May at his acceptance speech for the Charlemagne prize for promoting European unity.

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Myanmar’s prominent Catholic Church leader has warned that the world's ecological crisis is being fueled by greed, and that climate change has destructive powers equivalent to those of nuclear weapons. "Today we face an environmental holocaust. It is a scary moment…. Climate change is an atom bomb waiting to explode," Myanmar’s first Cardinal, Charles Bo Archbishop of Yangon said in his keynote speech at the Asia-Oceania Meeting of Religious (AMOR) forum in Yangon on Feb. 27.   Just over 130 men and women religious attended the forum held at St. Mary's Cathedral compound Feb. 27-March 3.

The 69-year-old cardinal told the forum that greed has unleashed ecological terrorism upon the Earth while adding that the poor are the most affected.  He cited Pope Francis' environmental encyclical “Laudato Si' saying that degradation to the environment was being caused by "economic terrorists and ecological terrorists." 

The Salesian cardinal spoke on the forum's theme, "Call for Global Ecological Conversion."   One of the five objectives of the forum was to undergo in-depth biblico-theological reflection on the challenges posed by “Laudato Si' and the Papal Bull Misericordiae Vultus (The Face of Mercy) by which Pope Francis convoked the Jubilee of Mercy. 

AMOR was founded in 1972 and was created to enable women religious leaders across Asia to meet every three years to exchange ideas. It is AMOR's first meeting in Myanmar.  Impoverished Myanmar is considered the second most vulnerable nation to climate change.  (Source: UCAN)

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(Vatican Radio)  A one-day workshop was held on Friday in the Vatican on ‘Twitter Diplomacy at the Holy See’. The event was hosted by the Vatican Secretariat for Communications (SPC), in conjunction with the British Embassy to the Holy See.

Participants in the workshop included Britain’s Ambassadors to the Holy See, Sally Axworthy, and to Austria, Leigh Turner, along with Hungary’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Eduard Habsburg, and Professor Giovanni Maria Vian, Director of the Osservatore Romano.

Pope Francis touches minds and hearts on social networks

“Where people are, the Church is. This is why the Pope is present on Twitter and Instagram.” That was the explanation given by the SPC’s Secretary, Msgr. Lucio Adrian Ruiz.

The event brought together diplomats and other personalities who, in the Vatican and the Church, seek to spread the message of the Gospel through social media, especially on Twitter.

Workshop participants shared their experiences and the ways in which communications have changed after the spread of social networks – even at the institutional level.

Participants gave particular attention to the positive role offered by Pope Francis daily through his account @Pontifex, which is followed by more than 32 million people in 9 languages.

They called the Pope a leader on social networks, because he knows how to touch minds and hearts through his interventions on important themes for all people, believers and non-believers alike.

Digital media holds an ever more important role in diplomacy

Sally Axworthy, Britain’s Ambassador to the Holy See, told Alessandro Gisotti after the event that the digital dimension is assuming an ever greater role in diplomacy. She said there are many points on which, even via Twitter, that the Holy See and international diplomacy can find a way to collaborate.

Ms. Axworthy also underlined that, as Pope Francis has eloquently shown, social networks can help reach an extremely wide public on themes of common interest.

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(Vatican Radio) The Vatican Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff on Friday published the calendar of liturgical celebrations at which Pope Francis will preside during March and April of 2017. 

The list includes the Masses to be celebrated during the Holy Father's pastoral visits to Milan on March 25 and Carpi on April 2, as well as other events surrounding Holy Week and Easter.

Please find below the full list:

MARCH

Friday 17: at 5 p.m. in the Vatican Basilica, penitential celebration.

Saturday 25: Solemnity of the Assumption of the Lord. Pastoral visit to Milan.

APRIL

Sunday 2: Fifth Sunday of Lent. Pastoral visit to Carpi.

Sunday 9: Palm Sunday and the Passion of the Lord: At 10 a.m. in St. Peter's Square, commemoration of the entry of the Lord in Jerusalem, and Holy Mass.

Thursday 13: Holy Thursday. At 9.30 a.m. in the Vatican Basilica, Chrism Mass.

Friday 14: Good Friday. At 5 p.m. in the Vatican Basilica, celebration of the Passion of the Lord.

At 9.15 p.m. at the Colosseum, Rome: Via Crucis (Way of the Cross).

Saturday 15: Holy Saturday. At 8.30 p.m. in the Vatican Basilica, Easter vigil.

Sunday 16: Easter Sunday. At 10 a.m., in the Vatican Basilica, Holy Mass.

At midday, from the Central balcony of the Vatican Basilica, “Urbi et Orbi” blessing.

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Paterson, N.J., Mar 3, 2017 / 06:36 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Catholic chapel that has served a New Jersey shopping mall since 1970 has scheduled its final Mass.

St. Therese’s Chapel at the Bergen Town Center in Paramus, N.J. was set to close on Ash Wednesday. The chapel, also called the Chapel on the Mall, was run by Carmelite priests.

Father Eugene Joseph Bettinger, 70, served as the chapel’s executive director, the New York Times reports.

“It will be a Lent of the hunting,” he told his congregation during Mass. “After Ash Wednesday, it will be quite the desert experience for us.”

The chapel drew close to 1,000 people each week for its Masses, held three times a day Monday through Saturday. At times, people would go to the chapel in groups to say the rosary or to pray silently.

The chapel, its offices, and its gift shop took up 5,000 square feet. Ten years ago it moved from a cramped location in the mall basement on condition that its lease would go month-to-month.

The mall’s management recently decided to end the lease.

Parishioners are hoping to find a better space. Fr. Bettinger said new locations have been scouted, but cost may be prohibitive. A new monthly lease could cost as much as $10,000, compared to the $2,000 the chapel had been paying.

A new location would also disrupt the community that has built up at the chapel.

Susan Munroe, a 56-year-old consecrated virgin, has volunteered at the chapel for several years. She told the New York Times the chapel has shown “prayerfulness” and has built community.

One chapel regular, 83-year-old Mary Rogers, had been coming for decades. She is hoping for a new location soon.

“We’re praying to St. Therese, the patron saint,” she said. “My days just don’t go as well if I don’t go to Mass.”

The Carmelites also run a chapel in a mall in Peabody, Mass.

 

 

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Vatican City, Mar 3, 2017 / 09:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis and members of the Roman Curia leave Sunday to begin their annual five-day retreat on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius; since 2014, held at the Casa Divin Maestro retreat house.

Casa Divin Maestro, nestled away in the woods on Lake Albano, is just a short distance from the Papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo in the town of Ariccia, some 16 miles outside of Rome.

One view from the retreat house encompasses the lake and the town of Castel Gandolfo; even the dome of St. Peter's Basilica is visible in the distance.

The peace and serenity of the location reflects the mood Pope Francis wants to set for the entire retreat, Fr. Olinto Crespi told CNA.

“We know that the Pope does not rotate much: room, chapel, dining room. He speaks very little, even at the table. There is always a background of music and he himself stays silent,” he said. It is like “the real exercises of the school of St. Ignatius.”

Head of the household at Casa Divin Maestro, Fr. Crespi is one of five Pauline priests acting as “hosts” of the Holy Father and the Curia during the retreat. They are all “new” he said, so it will be the first time for all of them hosting the Holy Father.

The practice of the Pope going on retreat with the heads of Vatican dicasteries each Lent began some 80 years ago under Pope Paul XI. The spiritual exercises were held in the Vatican, but beginning in Lent 2014, Pope Francis chose to hold the retreat outside of Rome.

“Doing the exercises in the Vatican, at the time the meditation was given, each prelate went into his office. Therefore the Jesuit Pope wanted the exercises to be made in an atmosphere of recollection and prayer and they will do only the exercises,” Fr. Crespi said.

The five-day long retreat will include preaching on the Gospel of Matthew by Franciscan Fr. Giulio Michelini, selected by the Pope to preach for the occasion.

A typical day during the retreat begins with Mass followed by breakfast, Fr. Crespi said. They will then return to the chapel for the preaching by Fr. Michelini. After lunch they return to the chapel.

While many other groups that hold events at the house will gather in the auditorium, Fr. Crespi said that Pope Francis “wants to be alone in the chapel.”

“And this says further the climate that Francis wants to create,” he said. Even the Pauline Fathers of the retreat house “are asked not to disturb.”

The house has a good telephone line and good Wi-Fi, Fr. Crespi said, so there may be some time for cardinals to do a little work during the week if needed, but “the Pope himself sees very little. He is very reserved.”

Before Francis began going to Casa Divin Maestro for his annual spiritual exercises, the house was not unknown in the Vatican or to cardinals. Fr. Crespi believes that either the Pope heard of the place through word of mouth or perhaps he had even been there himself while still a cardinal.

“Even the Swiss Guards were here for a retreat,” he said. They would go on runs in the woods in the early mornings, which, he joked, “certainly the cardinals do not do.”

 

 

 

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Jamal Nasrallah, EPA

By Dale Gavlak

AL-UM-KUNDUN, Jordan (CNS) -- Catholic leaders have expressed concern for tens of thousands of Iraqi Christian refugees sheltering in Jordan as access to international aid tightens with crises deepening in the Middle East and elsewhere.

"The situation of Iraqi Christians refugees is critical and dangerous," Father Khalil Jaar told Catholic News Service on the sidelines of a conference hosted by the Vatican Embassy in Amman and the Catholic charity, Caritas Jordan.

Meeting at Our Lady of Peace Center on the hilly, tree-lined outskirts of the Jordanian capital, the leaders sought better cooperation and were exploring income-generation projects for the refugees badly in need of funds.

"They have finished their money and they aren't allowed to work. How can they live in human dignity?" asked Father Jaar, who has devoted his ministry to aiding Iraqi and Syrian refugees flooding into Jordan from neighboring conflicts for more than a decade.

Daniela Cicchella of the Jordanian offices of the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, told the gathering that 700,000 refugees of 42 nationalities are registered with the agency in the country. The Jordanian government says it hosts 1.5 million refugees and its budget, water, electricity and other services are overburdened by the numbers.

"We are doing our best to preserve and protect the dignity of the refugees in Jordan. It's our country where we can feel free to work under the umbrella of our government. I hope we can do something better in the future," said Father Jaar, who grew up as a Palestinian refugee from Bethlehem, West Bank.

But the priest has experienced his own challenges trying to provide 200 Iraqi Christian pupils with an education when they were unable to enroll in Jordanian schools after fleeing the so-called Islamic State invasion of their homeland in August 2014.

"At any month we might have to close the school, because we don't have the money to run it. Everything is gratis for the children: transportation, uniforms, school supplies," he said, explaining that their parents cannot afford such expenses when just feeding the family is a struggle. "I hope our good friends can help."

"This is now the third year of displacement for the Iraqi Christians. It's very tough. Donations are becoming less, while global attention is waning," Ra'ed Bahou, regional director of the Pontifical Mission, told CNS.

"That means that more problems will be created for these Iraqis. We are trying our best to help them with health care, education, housing and logistics. But the problem is bigger than us," he warned.

Bahou estimates that about 1,000 Iraqi Christian families who came to Jordan after escaping the horrors of the Islamic State takeover of Mosul and the surrounding villages have now resettled in Australia, Canada and elsewhere.

"But another 1,000 or more have come from Iraq. We are trying to coordinate between different organizations, especially Catholic, to cope with these people and their needs," Bahou said.

Only 61,000 of the 140,000 Iraqis sheltering in Jordan are registered with the U.N. refugee agency, said Caritas Jordan program manager Omar Abawi. "Many of the Iraqi refugees are facing increased vulnerability in their living conditions," he told the gathering.

Abawi mentioned some of the challenges. The majority of the refugees are women and children who experience high cost of living expenses. While Syrian refugees have now been granted the right to work legally in Jordan, Iraqi refugees and those from other countries, such as Yemen, Sudan and Somalia, do not have that right. Most refugee children lose out on at least one year of schooling. Basic health services, once provided to Syrian refugees free of charge or for a nominal fee, were never accessible to Iraqi refugees.

"I am always struck by their desperate words about losing hope and the miserable conditions they live under," said Wael Suleiman, Caritas Jordan general director. They experience "frustration, loneliness, isolation, despair and sadness over their forced exodus from their country, families, history, current situation and future."

"We are here to heal the wounds, lift the morales, help to restore hope, enhance human relationships and reflect the concept of living as one human family," Suleiman said.

"Pope Francis' message for the Easter fast urges us to work and deal with others, as they are grace. Today's call is to open our heart for others, especially strangers," he said.

The Vatican is funding a job-creation program for Iraqi refugees in Jordan. More than a dozen will have full-time work cultivating, producing and selling vegetables and oil, while another 200 Iraqi refugees are expected to receive training in carpentry, agriculture and the food industry. An additional 500 will be given seasonal employment.

UNHCR's Cicchella said a pilot project employing Iraqi engineers and IT specialists outside of Jordan on a short-term basis is being explored, as are educational scholarships.

Many church leaders believe it would take time, iron-clad security guarantees and rebuilt infrastructure before Iraqi Christians would consider returning home, but even then many Iraqi Christians now say they can only see their future in the West.

"We need to be optimistic that they can go back to their villages," Bahou said. "They were there 2,000 years and we need them to be back there."

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