US President Joe Biden, America’s second Catholic president, and his wife Jill will have an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican on October 29, the White House announced Thursday.
“They will discuss working together on efforts grounded in respect for fundamental human dignity, including ending the COVID-19 pandemic, tackling the climate crisis, and caring for the poor,” the White House said in a statement.
Pope Francis, 84, was to undergo surgery Sunday in Rome for an inflamed large colon, a Vatican statement said.
The pontiff was admitted to the Gemelli University Hospital “for a scheduled surgery for symptomatic diverticular stenosis of the colon”, it said.
The condition causes potentially painful inflammation of the diverticulum, a pocket that can form on the colon walls and which tend to multiply with age.
A potential complication is an abnormal narrowing of the colon.
A health bulletin was to be issued once the operation had been completed.
Born on December 17, 1936 in Argentina, Francis lost part of his right lung at the age of 21. He also suffers from a hip problem and sciatica.
The pope announced earlier Sunday that he will visit Slovakia in September after a brief stop in Hungary to celebrate a mass in Budapest.
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Francis’ visit to Slovakia will include the cities of Bratislava, Presov, Kosice and Sastin, the Vatican said in a statement.
Although more detailed plans for the trip will be announced later, there was no sign the pope intends to meet Hungary’s political leaders during his stop in Budapest.
AFP
An influential Cardinal and nine others will be tried within the Vatican’s legal system over alleged financial wrongdoing, the Holy See announced Saturday.
Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was one of the most influential figures in the Vatican and a close ally of Pope Francis, will appear before the tribunal of the Holy See from July 27, according to a Vatican statement.
The 73-year-old was dismissed from a powerful Vatican job last September, after Francis told him he was accused of syphoning off Vatican charity funds to help his siblings.
Becciu will be prosecuted over embezzlement, abuse of power and witness tampering in the case, linked to a scandal concerning a loss-making Vatican investment in central London which happened under his watch. He has always professed his innocence.
Before his dismissal, he led the Vatican’s department on sainthoods. From 2011 to 2018 he was the Substitute for General Affairs, a role akin to chief of staff in the Vatican’s central bureaucracy.
Among the others set to face Vatican justice are Rene Bruelhart, former head of the Financial Information Authority (FIA), the Vatican’s financial watchdog.
He will face abuses of power charges as will Enrico Crasso, an investment fund manager who controlled millions of euros of Vatican money.
Among the others facing Vatican justice are former FIA director Tommaso Di Ruzza and Italian consultant Cecilia Marogna, known as “the Cardinal’s Lady” for her links with Becciu.
The investment at the heart of the scandal is a building in London’s upmarket Chelsea district, transformed into 50 luxury apartments.
Climate change is real and more must be done to protect people displaced by it, the Vatican said Tuesday, as it presented guidelines on helping millions forced to flee their homes.
The document, “Pastoral Orientations on Climate Displaced People,” is a series of policies and proposals to bishops’ conferences, local churches, congregations and organisations dealing with people displaced by climate impacts.
“The Catholic Church has a motherly care for all those who have been displaced by the effects of this crisis,” it read.
It is not the first time the Church has addressed the dangers and repercussions of climate change.
Pope Francis, who has made environmental protection one of the top focuses of his papacy, has often spoken out against global warming, calling it a major threat to the planet.
The document released Tuesday said it was intended as a “roadmap in pastoral planning of climate displaced people.”
“We are already in a climate crisis, one that is fast accelerating,” and “causing immense suffering to millions of our brothers and sisters around the world,” it said.
“It is the poor and vulnerable communities around the world who are disproportionately affected by the ecological and climate crises.
“They are the innocent ones, having contributed least to causing the problem in the first place.”
– ‘Destructive activity’ –
Millions of people have been forced to leave their homes due to the impacts of climate change, from extreme weather to environmental degradation.
According to figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, cited by the Vatican, natural disasters triggered 24.9 million displacements across 140 countries and territories in 2019 — three times the number displaced by violence.
The new guidelines address ways to raise awareness of climate displaced people, encourage dialogue with governments and policy-makers, and call for welcoming displaced people into the Church.
In a preface to the document, Pope Francis said although people being driven from their homes due to severe climate events might look inevitable, “like a process of nature,” the reality was often otherwise.
“The deteriorating climate is very often the result of poor choices and destructive activity, of selfishness and neglect, that set humankind at odds with creation, our common home,” he wrote.
At an online press conference, the Archbishop of Beira in Mozambique spoke remotely from his diocese, describing the destruction caused by a series of unprecedented powerful cyclones over the past two years.
Monsignor Claudio Dalla Zuanna described how 2019’s Cyclone Idai destroyed 90 percent of the buildings in Beira and sparked devastating flooding, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Another priest, Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, who works in the Vatican department that complied the report, called climate change “ultimately a moral problem”.
“The poor and vulnerable communities whose carbon emissions are only a fraction of those of the rich world are already the early and disproportionate victims of the crisis,” he said.
Pope Francis prayed Sunday for “victims of war” outside a centuries-old church in Iraq’s Mosul, where the Islamic State group ravaged one of the world’s oldest Christian communities until the jihadists’ defeat three years ago.
With the crumbling stone walls of the Al-Tahera (Immaculate Conception) Church behind him, Pope Francis made a plea for Christians in Iraq and the Middle East to stay in their homelands.
The 84-year-old pontiff said the “tragic” exodus of Christians from war-scarred Iraq and the wider region “does incalculable harm not just to the individuals and communities concerned, but also to the society they leave behind”.
The IS onslaught forced hundreds of thousands of Christians in northern Iraq’s Nineveh province to flee. Iraq’s Christian population has shrunk to fewer than 400,000 from around 1.5 million before the US-led invasion of 2003.
The faithful had gathered on Sunday in the courtyard of the Al-Tahera Church, whose roof collapsed during fighting against IS in 2017.
It is one of the oldest of at least 14 churches in Nineveh province that were destroyed by IS.
Boutros Chito, a Catholic priest in Mosul, said the pope’s visit could change the way people think about his city, the ancient centre of which still lies in ruins.
“Pope Francis will announce to the whole world that we are the people of peace, a civilisation of love,” Chito told AFP.
The heaviest deployment of security forces yet has been mobilised to protect Francis on what is perhaps the riskiest day of his historic trip to Iraq, where state forces are still hunting IS sleeper cells.
Pope Francis’s trip to Iraq as a “pilgrim of peace” aims to reassure the country’s dwindling Christian community and to expand his dialogue with other religions.
On Saturday, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics met Iraq’s top Shiite Muslim cleric, the reclusive Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who agreed that Iraq’s Christians should be able to live in “peace”.
“We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion,” Francis said at an interfaith service in the ancient site of Ur later that morning.
Watching from afar as IS swept across Nineveh in 2014, Pope Francis said at the time he was ready to come and meet the displaced and other victims of war in a show of solidarity.
Seven years later, he is visiting both Mosul and Qaraqosh, one of Iraq’s oldest Christian towns whose residents still speak a dialect of Syriac, the language spoken by Jesus Christ.
It, too, was largely destroyed when IS rampaged through the area, but its residents have trickled back since 2017 and slowly worked at rebuilding their hometown.
“This very important visit will boost our morale after years of difficulties, problems and wars,” said Father George Jahoula in Qaraqosh.
To honour the pope, local artisans wove a two-metre (6.5-foot) prayer shawl, or stole, with the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” prayers carefully hand-stitched in golden thread in Syriac.
It was given to Francis on his first day in Iraq on Friday.
Francis landed early on Sunday at the airport in the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil, which was targeted just a few weeks ago by a volley of rockets that killed two people.
He held a brief meeting with regional president Nechirvan Barzani and his cousin, the prime minister Masrour Barzani.
Many thousands of troops and police have been deployed as the pope has criss-crossed Iraq, taking planes, helicopters and armoured convoys to cover more than 1,400 kilometres (870 miles) in-country.
The other major challenge is the Covid-19 pandemic, with Iraq gripped by a second wave bringing around 5,000 new cases per day.
Authorities have imposed a nationwide lockdown — ostensibly to keep cases down but also to help control movements of crowds during the pope’s high-profile visit.
While Francis has been vaccinated, Iraq has only just begun a modest inoculation campaign and there are fears that the crowds gathering to see him could lead to super-spreader events.
The biggest event yet will be on Sunday afternoon, when several thousand people will gather at Arbil’s Franso Hariri stadium for the Pope’s last mass in Iraq.
Arbil has been a relative haven of stability and a place of refuge for many Christians who fled IS.
Pope Francis prayed on Sunday for “victims of war” outside a centuries-old church in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, heavily damaged by the Islamic State group ravaged one of the world’s oldest Christian communities until the jihadists’ defeat three years ago.
The 84-year-old said the exodus of Christians from Iraq and the broader Middle East “does incalculable harm not just to the individuals and communities concerned, but also to the society they leave behind.”
With the crumbling stone walls of the Al-Tahera (Immaculate Conception) Church behind him, Pope Francis made a plea for Christians in Iraq and the Middle East to stay in their homelands.
The pontiff said the “tragic” exodus of Christians from war-scarred Iraq and the wider region “does incalculable harm not just to the individuals and communities concerned, but also to the society they leave behind”.
The IS onslaught forced hundreds of thousands of Christians in northern Iraq’s Nineveh province to flee. Iraq’s Christian population has shrunk to fewer than 400,000 from around 1.5 million before the US-led invasion of 2003.
The faithful had gathered on Sunday in the courtyard of the Al-Tahera Church, whose roof collapsed during fighting against IS in 2017.
It is one of the oldest of at least 14 churches in Nineveh province that were destroyed by IS.
Boutros Chito, a Catholic priest in Mosul, said the pope’s visit could change the way people think about his city, the ancient centre of which still lies in ruins.
“Pope Francis will announce to the whole world that we are the people of peace, a civilisation of love,” Chito told AFP.
The heaviest deployment of security forces yet has been mobilised to protect Francis on what is perhaps the riskiest day of his historic trip to Iraq, where state forces are still hunting IS sleeper cells.
Pope Francis’s trip to Iraq as a “pilgrim of peace” aims to reassure the country’s dwindling Christian community and to expand his dialogue with other religions.
On Saturday, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics met Iraq’s top Shiite Muslim cleric, the reclusive Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who agreed that Iraq’s Christians should be able to live in “peace”.
“We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion,” Francis said at an interfaith service in the ancient site of Ur later that morning.
Watching from afar as IS swept across Nineveh in 2014, Pope Francis said at the time he was ready to come and meet the displaced and other victims of war in a show of solidarity.
Seven years later, he is visiting both Mosul and Qaraqosh, one of Iraq’s oldest Christian towns whose residents still speak a dialect of Syriac, the language spoken by Jesus Christ.
It, too, was largely destroyed when IS rampaged through the area, but its residents have trickled back since 2017 and slowly worked at rebuilding their hometown.
“This very important visit will boost our morale after years of difficulties, problems and wars,” said Father George Jahoula in Qaraqosh.
To honour the pope, local artisans wove a two-metre (6.5-foot) prayer shawl, or stole, with the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” prayers carefully hand-stitched in golden thread in Syriac.
It was given to Francis on his first day in Iraq on Friday.
Francis landed early on Sunday at the airport in the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil, which was targeted just a few weeks ago by a volley of rockets that killed two people.
He held a brief meeting with regional president Nechirvan Barzani and his cousin, the prime minister Masrour Barzani.
Many thousands of troops and police have been deployed as the pope has criss-crossed Iraq, taking planes, helicopters and armoured convoys to cover more than 1,400 kilometres (870 miles) in-country.
The other major challenge is the Covid-19 pandemic, with Iraq gripped by a second wave bringing around 5,000 new cases per day.
Authorities have imposed a nationwide lockdown — ostensibly to keep cases down but also to help control movements of crowds during the pope’s high-profile visit.
While Francis has been vaccinated, Iraq has only just begun a modest inoculation campaign and there are fears that the crowds gathering to see him could lead to super-spreader events.
The biggest event yet will be on Sunday afternoon, when several thousand people will gather at Arbil’s Franso Hariri stadium for the Pope’s last mass in Iraq.
Arbil has been a relative haven of stability and a place of refuge for many Christians who fled IS.
AFP
Pope Francis has broken with Catholic tradition to appoint a woman as an undersecretary of the synod of bishops, the first to hold the post with voting rights in a body that studies major questions of doctrine.
Frenchwoman Nathalie Becquart is one of the two new undersecretaries named Saturday to the synod, where she has been a consultant since 2019.
The appointment signals the pontiff’s desire “for a greater participation of women in the process of discernment and decision-making in the church”, said Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary-general of the synod.
“During the previous synods, the number of women participating as experts and listeners has increased,” he said.
“With the nomination of Sister Nathalie Becquart and her possibility of participating in voting, a door has opened.”
The synod is led by bishops and cardinals who have voting rights and also comprises experts who cannot vote, with the next gathering scheduled for autumn 2022.
A special synod on the Amazon in 2019 saw 35 female “auditors” invited to the assembly, but none could vote.
The Argentinian-born pope has signalled his wish to reform the synod and have women and laypeople play a greater role in the church.
He named Spaniard Luis Marin de San Martin as the other under undersecretary in the synod of bishops.
Becquart, 52, a member of the France-based Xaviere Sisters, has a master’s degree in management from the prestigious HEC business school in Paris and studied in Boston before joining the order.
AFP
Both Pope Francis and his predecessor, former pope Benedict XVI, have received the coronavirus vaccine, the Vatican said on Thursday.
“I can confirm that as part of the Vatican City State vaccination programme to date, the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine has been administered to Pope Francis and the Pope Emeritus,” spokesman Matteo Bruni said.
Pope Francis will make a historic visit to Iraq in March, the Vatican said Monday, the first ever by a pontiff and which will include a trip to Mosul.
The 83-year-old has long spoken of his desire to visit the Middle Eastern country, although the Vatican said the programme would “take into consideration the evolution of the worldwide health emergency”.
Francis will be the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to visit Iraq, where the number of Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades.
“He will visit Baghdad, the plain of Ur… the city of Erbil, as well as Mosul and Qaraqosh in the plain of Nineveh,” spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement, during a trip planned from March 5 to 8, 2021.
There were more than one million Christians in Iraq but just a few hundred thousand are left following sectarian warfare after the 2003 US-led invasion and the Islamic State group’s sweep through a third of the country in 2014.
The pope’s visit to Mosul will be particularly significant, given that it was a former stronghold of the Islamic State group.
Francis was forced to cancel all foreign trips in June after it became clear that coronavirus, which hit Italy in early March, would make travel for the elderly pontiff too dangerous.
He said last year that Iraq was on his list for 2020 trips.
At the time he said he hoped Iraq could “face the future through the peaceful and shared pursuit of the common good on the part of all elements of society, including the religious, and not fall back into hostilities sparked by the simmering conflicts of the regional powers.”.
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“The pope’s visit will come as the realisation of a dream of his predecessor, Pope St. John Paul II,” the Vatican’s news portal said.
“The Polish pope had planned to travel to Iraq at the end of 1999, but was prevented by Saddam Hussein,” it added.
The Iraqi government welcomed news of Francis’ visit, with the foreign ministry saying: “It symbolises a message of peace to Iraq and the whole region.”
President Barham Saleh officially invited the pope to visit Iraq in July 2019, hoping it would help the country “heal” after years of strife.
AFP
One of the most influential Vatican cardinals, Angelo Becciu from Italy, resigned his position unexpectedly on Thursday, the Holy See announced without explanation.
“The Holy Father accepted the resignation from the office of Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and from the rights connected to the Cardinalate, presented by His Eminence Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu,” a one-line statement late on Thursday said.
After a career as a Vatican emissary, Becciu has worked for the last six years as the Substitute for General Affairs, a role akin as chief of staff which means he sees Pope Francis daily and is one of his most trusted aides.
The 72-year-old was named as a cardinal in summer 2018 and has also had responsibility for the department that oversees beatifications and sainthoods.
His surprise resignation could be a sanction.
He has been linked in the past to an investigation underway within the Vatican over the last year into a property development in the exclusive Chelsea area of London which was paid for with offshore funds and companies.
The process to invest in the scheme to build luxury apartments began in 2014 when Becciu was in the Vatican secretariat, the central bureaucracy of the Holy See.
The Vatican’s police force raided the offices of the secretariat last year to seize financial documents and computers, while five members of staff were suspended.
Becciu defended the purchase at the beginning of the year during an interview.
AFP
