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(Vatican Radio) During his Angelus address on Sunday in St Peter’s Square, Pope Francis took his cue from the Gospel reading of the day in which Jesus calls us not to worry about tomorrow, recalling that above all there is a loving Father who never forgets his children.

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Drawing from this passage the Pope reminded the pilgrims and tourists present to trust in God who takes care of the living beings of creation.

Trusting in him, explained the Holy Father, “will not magically solve our problems, but it lets us face them with the right frame of mind.”

Pope Francis went on to say that, “God is not distant or anonymous: he is our refuge, the source of our serenity and our peace.”

When we distance ourselves from God we end up following the obsessive pursuit of worldly goods and riches. However, Jesus, the Holy Father said, “tells us that this desperate search is an illusion and a cause of unhappiness.”  Quoting from scripture, Pope Francis reiterated that "You cannot serve God and wealth"; one has to choose constantly the road that leads to God, because the temptation to reduce everything to money, pleasure and power is pressing. Choosing God’s path, observed the Holy Father may not immediately bear fruit but it ultimately leads to fulfillment and the realization of his plans for us.

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Boulder, Colo., Feb 26, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For Erika Bachiochi, the Catholic Church has been able to offer a genuine pro-woman theology which not only safeguards and protects her stance as a feminist, but also enhances her ability to be strong in all aspects of her life.

Dr. Mary Anne Case would like to differ. She believes that while Catholic feminism exists, the institutional Catholic Church – namely the Vatican and Magisterium – is overtly anti-woman.

These two legal scholars from varied backgrounds met on the common stage of feminism at the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought’s 10th annual Great Debate in Boulder, Colo. on Feb. 23. The two women presented dissenting arguments for both sides of the spectrum on Catholic feminism and tackled the question: is the Church anti-woman?

Dr. Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago, answered in the affirmative, while Erika Bachiochi, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, answered in the negative.

“In my lifetime, the Church that had made me a feminist betrayed me,” Dr. Case said in her opening statements.

“I think the Church has let us down, and I think the Church has let us down relatively recently. The early church was very much not anti-woman. The gospels are not anti-woman,” she continued, saying the Catholic Church of the past was not anti-feminist.

However, Dr. Case argued that when the Church definitively said “no” to priestly ordination for women in the 1970s, they closed the door to half of the population of the Church.

“The problem with the Catholic Church is that all authority flows from ordination. The Magisterium – as it need not be – is composed of men and cardinals,” Dr. Case said, suggesting that women should at least be allowed in the decision-making that flows from the hierarchy of the Magisterium.

The law professor spoke at the debate wearing a button from the 1970s on her shirt that said “If you aren't going to ordain women, stop baptizing them.”

This, she said, is a representation of the economy of salvation: if women cannot be priests because they do not image Christ, how can women become saved in the eyes of the Church, since salvation can only arrive through the extent that Christ images us?

Dr. Case also pointed to some of the Catholic Church's greatest thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that “women are necessarily in a state of subjection,” and that females are “misbegotten males.” She also highlighted that the Sistine Chapel’s Creation of Man, is indeed that of a man – and does not include Eve.

Within the last 50 years, Dr. Case believes that the Church shifted away from the idea that men and women are equal when it introduced the idea of complementarity, particularly seen in Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, saying that placing characteristics or roles on each gender negates their equality.

“There should be no fixed notions concerning the role of males and females,” Dr. Case suggested, and pointed to St. Augustine’s notion that the soul does not have a sex.

In response, Bachiochi said that “papal teaching has rejected the essentialist view that woman and men possess mutually exclusive fixed character traits.” Sexuality does not take away from the equality of men and women, she said, but simply makes them “distinctive.”

While Bachiochi was once a pro-choice, socialist feminist, she has since shifted her beliefs towards the teachings and beliefs of Catholicism. She agreed with Dr. Case on a number of different levels, saying that “there should be more women's voices in the Church.”

However, the most notable differences between the two scholars was on the point of clerics and sexual teachings. While Dr. Case argued that women can and should be ordained Catholic priests, Bachiochi said the notion reeked of clericalism.

“I have no less authority than a priest as a baptized Christian,” Bachiochi said.

“A priest has authority to represent Christ in a sacramental way, and I have the authority to represent Christ in every other area of my life,” she said, adding that the focus on female priests can also take away from the good work that professional and religious women are already doing within the Church.

However, Dr. Case pointed out that men in the Catholic Church “have all of the opportunities, and then some. How can the church not be anti-women…if women are not part of the decision making?”

To this, Bachiochi agreed that more female voices are needed within the Church, but did point to the Pontifical Council of the Laity, which seeks female voices, and other prominent church leaders such as Mary Glendon, who serves on various Vatican boards, and Sr. Prudence Allen, R.S.M., who is a philosopher appointed to the Vatican’s International Theological Commission.

Bachiochi went on to find fundamental differences with the modern idea of feminism, which claims that abortion and contraception rights are the capstone to the whole movement. She has found in her own experience that these same notions can also be the downfall to women.

Instead, Bachiochi suggested that Catholic feminism indeed exists, and is protected by the Church, precisely because of its teachings about sexual and reproductive rights, particularly Natural Family Planning.

“I believe that Catholic Christianity, and in particular the controversial sexual teachings of the Catholic Church, are deeply pro-woman. It was precisely these teachings on monogamy, divorce, birth control, abortion and infanticide that attracted women in the first century into the Christian fold,” Bachiochi stated.

“As a feminist, NFP does something that contraception neglects… it gets men to think about the reality,” she noted, saying that through NFP, less pressure is put on the woman to take the pill or get an IUD, and more emphasis is placed on men and their responsibility in the sexual act.

She also mentioned that the Catholic Church in particular has always been pro-woman, as seen through its recognition of female saints, political leaders, and scholars, and its production of educational systems and healthcare centered around the good of women.

Bachiochi additionally noted that “Mary, the Mother of God, is heralded by the Catholic Church as the single greatest human that has ever lived.”

“The greatest among us are not the clerics, but the saints.”

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Vatican City, Feb 26, 2017 / 05:37 am (CNA/EWTN News).- While earthly pleasures such as power and money bring temporary satisfaction, they are ultimately fleeting and deceptive, Pope Francis said Sunday, explaining that God alone is faithful and in trusting him, we have nothing to worry about.

“God is not a distant an anonymous being: he is our refuge, the source of our serenity and our peace,” the Pope said Feb. 26. “He is the rock of our salvation, to whom we can cling with the certainty of not falling; he is our defense against the evil that is always lurking.”

For each of us God is a “great friend, allay and father,” he said, but noted that sadly, “we don’t always realize it.”

“We don’t realize that we have a friend, a father, who loves us. We prefer to cling to immediate and contingent goods, forgetting, and at times refuting, the supreme good, which is the paternal love of God,” he said.

To know and feel that God is our Father is especially important “in this age of orphan-hood,” he said, noting that often times we distance ourselves from God’s love “when we go in obsessive pursuit of earthly goods and riches, thus showing an exaggerated love of these realities.”

Many friends or those whom “we think are friends” delude us with false illusions, he said, but stressed that “God never deludes.”

Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his Sunday Angelus address, focusing his speech on the day’s Gospel passage from Matthew in which God tells his disciples that “no one can serve two masters,” and that they don’t need to worry about necessities in life such as food, shelter or clothing, because “your heavenly Father knows that you need them.”

The passage serves as “a strong call to trust in God,” Francis said, explaining that God’s “benevolent and responsive gaze” watches over each of us on a daily basis.

This gaze often “flows beneath the worry of many concerns, which risk taking away serenity and balance,” he said, but noted that “this anxiety is often useless, because it isn’t able to change the course of events.”

Rather, Jesus tells us “not to worry about tomorrow” because “there is a loving Father who never forgets his children,” the Pope said. While trusting in him “doesn’t magically resolve our problems,” it allows us “to confront them with the right spirit.”

He said the “frantic search” for earthly goods and riches is ultimately “illusory and a reason for unhappiness,” but that Jesus gives both his disciples and us “a fundamental gift of life” when he tells them to seek the Kingdom of God before all else.

Part of this search means “trusting in God who does not delude,” he said, and told pilgrims to “get busy as faithful administrators of the goods that he has given us, even the earthly ones, but without ‘overdoing it’ as if everything, even our salvation, depended only on us.”

Turning to the Gospel verse where Jesus says “you cannot serve both God and mammon,” the Pope said it has to be “either the Lord, or fascinating but illusory idols.”

This is a choice that we are called to make not just once, but “in all of our actions, programs and commitments,” he said. “It’s a choice to make in a clear way and to be continuously renewed, because the temptations of reducing everything to money, power and pleasure are relentless.”

While pursuing and honoring these “false idols” brings “fleeting” yet tangible results, choosing the Kingdom of God doesn’t always bear immediate fruits, Pope Francis said, adding that “it’s a decision taken in hope and which leaves the full realization to God.”

“Christian hope is stretched to the future fulfillment of God’s promise and it does not cease before difficulties, because it is founded on fidelity to God, which never fails,” he said.

Francis closed his address praying that Mary would help each person to entrust themselves to the “love and goodness of the heavenly Father,” and to live both with and in him.

“This is the prerequisite for overcoming the torments and adversities of life, and even persecutions, as the witness of many of our brothers and sisters shows us,” he said, and led faithful in praying the traditional Marian prayer.

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Beirut, Lebanon, Feb 25, 2017 / 12:06 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Syriac-Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan has said that the number of youth wanting to leave the Middle East is a major concern, and stressed that if local Christians are going to stay, political agendas must be set aside.

“We hope that peace, reconciliation and stability will be realized as soon as possible,” the patriarch said Feb. 23. The problem is that there are geopolitical agendas that don’t involve us.”

Their greatest concern is “how to convince our people to return to their homelands,” he said, adding that “this goes above all for the youth...our youth are losing the virtue of hope.”

Head of the Syriac-Catholic Church of Antioch, Younan, who is based in Lebanon, spoke at the presentation of the project “Stand Together,” a digital ecumenical platform aimed at promoting religious freedom and drawing attention to persecuted Christians, particularly those from the Middle East.

The event was held at the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. Among the partners sponsoring the initiative were Communion and Liberation, Rome Reports and the ISCOM association.

In comments to journalists, Patriarch Younan said that if Christians are to stay in the Middle East, “a welcoming, peaceful environment must be created for them so that they can return.”

If they have gone abroad, “it means that they are threatened, persecuted or are truly in straights for everything: they no longer have anything.”

In the summer of 2014 some 100,000 people were forced to flee when ISIS stormed their homes and villages, demanding that Christians either convert to Islam, pay a hefty tax or face death.

According to a recent U.N. report, between January 2014 and October 2015, at least 18,802 civilians were killed in Iraq. About half of them died in Baghdad province. Another 36,000 were injured.

Another 3.2 million people were internally displaced, include about 1 million school-aged children. In addition, millions more have fled to surrounding countries and are currently living as refugees.

Younan said that when he visited Christians displaced from Mosul and the Nineveh Plain after they first fled, he spoke with the Kurdish president, who told him that within a matter of months or even weeks, his people would be back in their villages with the Kurdish Peshmerga army to protect them.

“Two and a half years have passed” since that conversation, the patriarch said, explaining that during a November visit to the Christian villages in Iraq recently liberated from ISIS, “half of the houses were torched, the churches burned.”

Faced with the situation, Younan said his people ask “how can we return if there is no stability, without a strong governing presence?” The burning of their houses and churches, he said, was as if ISIS were telling Christians “you won’t ever come back, we don’t want you.”

The patriarch sympathized with their concerns, admitting that if that he himself had a family with children, “I would not return.”

Another big problem for those who have fled to other countries, such as Lebanon, is the fact that frequently they are not given refugee status, he said, explaining that these people know they will “not ever be accepted as Lebanese,” and so try to move abroad to Australia, Canada, the United States and Sweden.

When asked what can be done to help Christians to stay rather than moving abroad, the patriarch said the world has to avoid letting individual countries go there “to negotiate in order to have greater advantages in trade.”

Local Christians will never be able to be protagonists of change in their home countries because they are such a small minority. Pointing to Egypt as an example, he noted that only 8-10 million of the 80 million people living there are Coptic Christians, and mosques frequently control the elections.

“We try to live in peace with the others but we need stronger interventions on the part of the family of nations to say to these peoples: ‘Live in the 21st century, not the 7th,’” he said. “There must be a unified approach.”

Younan also commented on Pope Francis’ frequent declaration that “no religion is terrorist.” When asked if he agreed this declaration also applies to Islam, the patriarch said that “it’s they who have to prove this, it’s not up to me or the Pope to say it.”

In general “relations with Islamic religious heads are good,” he said, but added that for him, this is only at the “politico-diplomatic level, to not say that there is fanaticism.”

“We meet, we speak in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Syria, but the important thing is that we can’t do more, we are oppressed by a fundamentalism radical Islam that receives funding,” he said, voicing his hope “that Europe reawakens and finds an adequate solution.”

Referring to Pope Francis’ May 23, 2016, meeting with Imam Ahmed al Tayyeb of the prestigious Al-Azhar monsque at the Vatican, Younan called the move “a diplomatic step,” but said he would have representatives at a special Feb. 24 seminar at the Al-Azhar University on countering religious justification for violence.

He said that representatives from his Church have been to the university – widely considered one of the most authoritative voices in Sunni Islam – several times, and that with the joint-seminar with the Vatican they “want to make the world see that they are open.”

However, he also said there are still problems in the educational system of the university, including lessons in which youth use verses of the Koran that endorse violence “as they are.”

“Some are tolerant, others much less,” he said, noting that the two men who killed French priest Jacques Hamel in July 2016, didn’t know the priest, but murdered him “because they were formed like this.”

“It’s there that we need to intervene,” he said, explaining that while the seminar is a step, “Azhar must reform itself.”

When it comes to Vatican diplomacy, the patriarch said they are already doing a lot to intervene in the crisis in the Middle East, “but it’s not enough.”

He recalled that during the 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family he urged the Vatican to speak with officials in the U.S. government, in the U.N. and with the foreign ministers in China, Russia and the E.U., telling them that the ancient Christian communities in the region “run the risk of disappearing.”

The primary message that needs to be conveyed is that “you must do something and enough with your own interests please,” he said, but added that so far, “nothing has been done.”

When asked if there was talk of Pope Francis visiting Kurdistan, Younan said that the proposal has been made by several bishops, but nothing is confirmed yet.

However, Younan said that while “will be very happy to have the visit of the Holy Father” if he does go, what they really want are “the facts that can reassure our people.”

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