On January 30, the dicastery announced that it would specifically investigate and judge cases involving individuals "who habitually have an imperfect use of reason."

This announcement delineates the jurisdiction of the doctrinal office, specifying that cases involving vulnerable adults with temporary limitations on their ability to understand, will or resist an offence should be referred to other Vatican departments.

This move seeks to address longstanding questions regarding the treatment of vulnerable adults within Church procedures, particularly in comparison to minors under the age of 18.

The discussion surrounding the protection of vulnerable adults from clerical sexual abuse has evolved over the past 15 years, with Church documents progressively acknowledging this group's need for safeguarding.

However, ambiguity regarding the scope of this protection has prompted debates, especially concerning adults in positions of dependency such as those under the spiritual guidance of clergy.

The recent clarification from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith underscores a more precise approach to defining its jurisdiction, limiting its investigative responsibilities to minors and those with a habitual impairment in reasoning.

The Vatican indicates that other cases of abuse involving vulnerable adults fall under the purview of various other dicasteries, depending on the nature of the alleged perpetrator and the victim's specific vulnerabilities.

This development represents the Vatican's ongoing efforts to address and mitigate clerical sexual abuse, highlighting a structured and differentiated approach to various victim categories.

It acknowledges the complexity of vulnerability and the need for specialised attention across different ecclesiastical bodies to ensure justice and protection for all Church community members.

Historically, the Church's legal framework has evolved to address the abuse of minors and vulnerable adults by clergy.

John Paul II's 2001 document Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela initially tasked the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with overseeing cases of minor abuse.

This was expanded by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 to include developmentally disabled adults over 18.

Pope Francis further refined these definitions in his 2019 document Vos Estis Lux Mundi which distinguished minors and vulnerable persons based on their capacity to understand or resist abuse.

Source

• OSV

The working document for this first assembly is to be unveiled to the press on June 20 and the names of those who will be participating in next October's gathering are also expected to be made public soon.

This is a momentous time in the life of the Church and the expectations of many Catholics are very high: in some ways they are comparable to those for a conclave to elect a new pope, certainly not those for previous assemblies of the Synod of Bishops.

Looking back from an historical perspective, when we try to figure out such expectations for the synodal process and, in the long run, synodality, an immediate and natural term of comparison is the Second Vatican Council.

Joan Chittister, the well-known Benedictine Sister and author from the United States, addresses exactly this issue in a column published on June 9 in National Catholic Reporter.

She looks at the relationship between synodality and Vatican II, not in theological language or concepts, but in terms of results.

The title — "Nothing really changed after Vatican II. But synodality may make a difference" — captures the argument Chittister tries to make.

"Whatever changes the people had wanted from the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council were, it seemed, formless, silent, lost in the bustle of a busy church frozen in a medieval mind.

"Instead, after 400 years without a council of reform, the kinds of changes the people had expected from this council lay yet in Rome, drying in wet ink there and largely ignored here," Chittister says.

Synodality: the vehicle that finally delivers?

She blames John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and the bishops for the failure to implement Vatican II, but argues that the undermining of the council started even before these two popes began making episcopal appointments:

The bishops from around the world who attended Vatican II voted yes for all of its documents, but once back on home soil, many simply ignored them, that's why.

Even more to the point, few, if any, priests taught the council documents to their congregations.

Few if any priests admitted that they themselves had not bothered to read the documents either.

Oh, a few churches redesigned their confession boxes and a few more took down the altar rails, but really, other than that and the move to the vernacular in all liturgical events — nothing much did happen. Most of the changes were window dressing.

But Chittister says synodality may be the vehicle that finally brings about all the changes that Vatican II promised but never delivered.

This time, Pope Francis is having the faithful themselves become part of the agenda-making process before the synod even convenes. The laity has been invited into the intellectual theology of the church rather than simply poised to bring pious concern to the event.

This time, the laity themselves have been deemed to determine what topics must be considered — married priests, genderism, marriage theology, equality, women priests, whatever.

They will be allowed to speak to what 99% of the church rather than the 1% of the church, its clerics, allow to be heard.

Mistaken and misleading from an historical and theological point of view

I have the greatest respect for Joan Chittister. Not many have done what she has done to keep the trajectories of Vatican II alive. She has changed a lot of lives for the better.

I also experienced, first-hand, the warm welcome of her religious community, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie (Pennsylvania), when I was invited to speak about Pope Francis a few years ago.

Chittister makes a number of valid points:

• the disappointments about ecumenism,
• the dismissal of the role of women in the Church,
• the absence of lay ministerial life in many of our churches.

Much of this is painfully true in many places, especially in the United States.

At the same time, her reading of Vatican II (at least as she describes it in her latest article) is profoundly mistaken and misleading from both an historical and theological point of view.

This carries serious risks as we approach a key moment in the "synodal process".

Historically, the council did change Catholicism, despite the shortcomings in its implementation.

It's a very complicated picture, and one that is still being drawn: what worked and did not work on a global scale; different stages in the council's reception in different parts of the world (or even in the same country); failures that cannot be attributed solely to the papacy or the clergy; the time span needed to measure the effects of a council like Vatican II.

An excessive focus on a narrow set of issues

The widespread impression from the Anglo-American point of view is that, while Vatican II changed Catholicism's relationship with other Christian denominations, world religions, and the secular world, it failed to fundamentally change the Church's internal dynamics and institutional structures of power.

But Vatican II also changed the Church internally, from a theological point of view, in ways that we now often minimize or take for granted.

The simple verdict that Vatican II was a failure is, in some ways, the flip side of arguments made by neo-conservative and neo-traditionalist Catholics in the United State.

Both sides place an excessive focus on a narrow set of issues and are dismissive of what the council meant for Catholics of other countries and even many American Catholics.

Theologically, the question is not - in my opinion - whether the council still needs to be implemented and, on some issues, augmented.

Vatican II took place sixty years ago and the papal magisterium itself has built on its teaching in undeniable ways, sometimes going beyond the letter of the council.

The question is how synodality can pick up the thread of Vatican II, together with hierarchical and collegial dimensions in the life of the Church.

A synodal Church will redefine those hierarchical and the collegial aspects, not remove them.

This renewed form of Catholicism is still in part amorphous. It is taking shape before our very eyes, and there is no clear canonical or ecclesiological script for us to follow.

But we know that there is a compass for this journey, and it is the Second Vatican Council - not just what its documents said (or failed to say), but also what the reception of Vatican II has taught us from 1962 right up to our own day.

Preparing for the long haul

To a given reading of what happened at Vatican II and its effects corresponds a set of expectations from synodality.

Those who see the council as a disappointment or a failed revolution are likely to look for a reenactment of that revolution.

But that is even more impossible today as it was back then. On the opposite side, who - with a certain amount of Schadenfreude - see the present situation of the Catholic Church in the secularized West as evidence of the failure of Vatican II, are likely to grab this opportunity to try and abrogate the developments of conciliar teaching, beginning with the liturgical reform.

If we see the council as a failure, and synodality as a chance to repair that failure (or worse, to avenge it), then we are bound to fail for sure. Synodality can change the Church, but not overnight.

The Synod assembly next October - the first of the two on synodality - is not likely to make any groundbreaking decisions. We must be prepared for the long haul.

In a Church that has become an integral part of the global media show business, managing expectations has become much more important than before.

Discernment is needed for expectations too, and this is much more difficult, because their dynamics are very different from the those of a spiritual conversation in a synodal gathering.

The expectations surrounding synodality are a delicate issue for another reason.

When John XXIII died in June 1963, the cardinals elected Paul VI precisely because he was in favor of continuing and completing John's council.

But if too many of the current cardinal-electors are frightened or alarmed by the Synod on synodality, they may vote for someone at the next conclave who is eager to bring Francis' project to a halt.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Hawking was an esteemed member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

St John Paul II named Hawking a member of the Academy in 1986. Its members are chosen on the basis of their academic credentials and professional expertise, not religious beliefs.

Hawking asserted that God had no role in creating the universe.

Yet his atheism did not keep him from engaging in dialogue and debate with the church.

The Vatican says the theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author helped foster a "fruitful dialogue" between science and faith.

"We are deeply saddened about the passing of our remarkable Academician Stephen Hawking who was so faithful to our Academy," tweeted the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Hawking was decorated by the Academy on 19 April 1975 with the Pius XI medal for his studies on "black holes".

He met four Popes in the course of his Academy work: Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

"He told the 4 Popes he met that he wanted to advance the relationship between Faith and Scientific Reason. We pray the Lord to welcome him in his glory," @CasinaPioIV, the Academy, tweeted last week.

The Vatican observatory, @SpecolaVaticana, also expressed its condolences to Hawking's family.

"We value the enormous scientific contribution he has made to quantum cosmology and the courage he had in facing illness," the Observatory tweeted in Italian.

Hawking was 76 when he died. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21.

His view on his illness and the way people should live may be summed up in the following statement he made:

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.

"Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

"And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

"It matters that you don't just give up."

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Zenit
• Catholic Herald
• The Boston Pilot
• Image: Catholic News Agency

In fact, he isn't dying. The report is "pure invention," Benedict's personal secretary Archbishop Georg Ganswein says.

Ganswein is also alleged to have said Benedict was "like a candle that fades slowly".

"He is serene, at peace with God, with himself and the world," the fake report that made its way into many media outlets continues.

"He can no longer walk without help and can no longer celebrate Mass. Please pray for our beloved Pope Benedict XVI."

In a media interview, Ganswein refuted the rumours.

"I have received in the last two days many messages that refer to this note, and people are worried.

"It is false and wrong, and I would like to know who the author of this is."

Ganswein says Benedict's brother was at the Vatican to visit him last week. "Both had a good time" during the week-long visit.

Earlier this month a Coptic Catholic bishop of Egypt said Benedict is now very weak at age 90, but still "aware of everything".

Source

• The Independent
• Christian Today
• Image: Catholic World Report

American Cardinal Raymond Burke was recently dismissed as a "disappointed man" upset over the loss of his power by fellow Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, coordinator of Pope Francis's "C9" council of cardinal advisers.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, head of the Vatican's liturgy department, was praised by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI as someone with whom the liturgy is in "good hands."

Maradiaga's comments on Burke came in a new interview book with his fellow Salesian, Father Antonio Carriero, titled Solo il Vangelo è rivoluzionario ("Only the Gospel is Revolutionary"), published in Italy by Piemme.

Burke, who was removed by Pope Francis in November 2014 as head of the Vatican's supreme court, is widely seen as the leader of the conservative opposition to the pontiff's document on the family Amoris Laetita and its cautious opening to Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

He was among four cardinals who submitted a set of questions, called dubia, to Francis, seeking to dispel what they described as "grave disorientation and great confusion" created by the document.

In the new interview, Maradiaga comes out swinging.

"That cardinal who sustains this," Maradiaga said, referring to the criticism of Amoris, "is a disappointed man, in that he wanted power and lost it. He thought he was the maximum authority in the United States.

"He's not the magisterium," Maradiaga said, referring to the authority to issue official teaching. "The Holy Father is the magisterium, and he's the one who teaches the whole Church. This other [person] speaks only his own thoughts, which don't merit further comment.

"They are the words," Maradiaga said, "of a poor man." Continue reading

Source and Image:

• Crux

"In the situation I was then in, and in the context of theological thinking in which I stood, Humanae Vitae was a difficult text for me," Benedict says.

"It was certainly clear that what it said was essentially valid, but the reasoning, for us at that time, and for me too, was not satisfactory."

I was looking for a comprehensive anthropological viewpoint," he continues. "In fact, it was [Pope] John Paul II who was to complement the natural-law viewpoint of the encyclical with a personalistic vision.

Benedict expressed these views in a new book published in Italy last Friday,

The book, Last Testament: In His Own Words, will be published in the U.S. Nov. 3 by Bloomsbury

The book is based on conversations Benedict had with German journalist Peter Seewald, with whom he also published a book-length interview during his papacy.

In his introduction to the volume, Seewald says the interviews were conducted "shortly before and after" Benedict's 2013 resignation and that the retired pope was given final approval over the text.

Source

• ncronline.org
• Image: dw.com alliance/dpa/E Ferrari

Benedict's comments were reported in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra.

The comments are in a new book of interviews between the retired Pope and journalist Peter Seewald.

Corriere della Serra has acquired the Italian newspaper rights for excerpts and has access to the book.

The book, called "Last Conversations" is scheduled to be released in September.

It is the first time in history that a former pope has judged his own pontificate after it is over.

The paper reported that, in one of the interviews with Seewald, Benedict said he came to know of the presence of a so-called gay lobby at the Vatican.

This was made up of four or five people who were seeking to influence Vatican decisions.

The article reported Benedict saying he managed to "break up this power group".

Gay rights campaigners have long said many gay people work for the Vatican.

Church sources have said they suspect that some banded together to support each other's careers and influence decisions in the bureaucracy.

Corriere della Serra also revealed how Benedict kept a diary during his papacy, which he now plans to destroy, despite its historical significance.

The upcoming book will also include details of the Pope Emeritus's life, faith and papacy, including his thoughts on current pope, Francis.

Benedict "admits his lack of resoluteness in governing", Corriere della Serra reported.

It is also reported that he was "surprised" when the cardinals chose Francis as his successor in 2013.

Corriere della Serra stated that Benedict "again denies blackmail or pressure" in his decision to resign.

But Benedict reportedly said he had to overcome his own doubts on the effect his choice could have on the future of the papacy.

Sources

• The Tablet
• Reuters
• Image: Catholic News Service

Benedict did this at the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican at a ceremony held to celebrate the anniversary of his ordination as priest 65 years ago.

Francis was at the event, as were some 30 cardinals and invited guests.

The retired pope gave an off-the-cuff, mini-theology lesson sprinkled with Greek and Latin.

Benedict thanked Francis for letting him live out his final years in a Vatican monastery, where he said he felt "protected".

"Thank you, Holy Father, for your goodness, which from the first moment of your election has struck every day of my life," Benedict XVI said, speaking without notes.

"We hope that you can go forward with all of us on this path of divine mercy, showing us the path of Jesus toward God."

At Tuesday's ceremony, Pope Francis entered the Clementine Hall and went straight to embrace Benedict.

The latter stood up and removed his white skullcap in a sign of deference.

They embraced several more times during the ceremony.

Benedict listened intently as Francis addressed him - as "Your Holiness" - lauding his 65 years of service to the Church.

Pope Francis said that Benedict continues to serve the Church, "not ceasing to truly contribute to her growth with strength and wisdom".

"And you do this," Francis said, "from that little Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican, that is shown in that way to be anything but that forgotten little corner to which today's culture of waste tends to relegate people when, with age, their strength diminishes."

Divine Providence, he said, "has willed that you, dear Brother, should reach a place one could truly call ‘Franciscan'."

"[From this place] emanates a tranquillity, a peace, a strength, a confidence, a maturity, a faith, a dedication, and a fidelity that does so much good for me, and gives strength to me and to the whole Church".

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• The Tablet
• Image: Catholic News Service

The Pope was asked about the subject by two young YouTube stars at a function at the Vatican on Sunday.

He was asked if he has ever considered resigning because he finds the demands of his job too much.

Francis, aged 79, answered in Spanish, saying, "It never occurred to me to stop being [pope] for the responsibilities."

"Allow me a confidence," he added as he addressed the closing of the VI "Scholas Occurrentes" workshop at the Vatican.

"It had never occurred to me that I would be elected pope," he said.

"It was a surprise, but in that moment, God gave me a peace that lasts to this day. This keeps me going. It's the grace I received."

"On the other hand, I'm by nature unconscious, so I keep going," he joked.

A report of the Pope's remarks on the Crux website noted that "Pope Francis was not asked, and did not answer, if he'd ever consider resigning the papacy, but if he's considered it to date".

In an interview with a Mexican TV station last year, Pope Francis said "I have a feeling that my pontificate will be brief. Four or five years, I don't know, even two or three."

At the time, he also praised his predecessors' decision to step down in 2013 as "courageous."

"Benedict should not be considered an exception, but an institution," Francis said at the time.

"Maybe he will be the only one for a long time, maybe he will not be the only one," he said, adding that in any event, "An institutional door has been opened."

Also present at the Vatican event on Sunday were Hollywood A-listers George Clooney, Richard Gere and Salma Hayek.

Sources

• Crux
• Image: Politico

Such claims, expressed in recent articles, were described by the Vatican as "pure inventions" and "absolutely untrue".

The claims relate to when the Pope emeritus was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Vatican said Benedict "confirms decisively" that "the publication of the Third Secret of Fatima is complete".

Continue reading

Francis will visit the camp while he is in Poland for World Youth Day.

He will follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who also visited Auschwitz.

In 2006, Benedict XVI questioned God amid what he described as a "stupefied" silence: "Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"

"I pray to God not to allow a similar thing ever to happen again," he said.

According to Fr Antonio Spadaro, who edits a Jesuit-run journal in Rome and is a confidante of Francis, the current Pope, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI before him, "finds this to be a mandatory, one could say fundamental, stop".

As with Benedict, during his visit Francis will share an interreligious prayer with leaders of the local Jewish community.

Fr Spadaro believes that just as the German pontiff questioned God during his visit to Auschwitz, Francis is bound to question humanity, as he did in 2014, when he visited the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, in Israel.

"Adam, where are you?" Francis asked at the time.

"Adam, who are you? I no longer recognise you. Who are you, o man? What have you become? Of what horror have you been capable? What made you fall to such depths?"

"In Auschwitz he will ask this question again to remind men and women that what was done here is incomprehensible," Fr Spadaro told Crux, minutes after a visit to the extermination camp.

On the other hand, the priest added, "in the relationship with God, Auschwitz is the icon of a world that doesn't know mercy".

More than 1 million Jews from all over Europe, 150,000 Poles, 25,000 gypsies, 15,000 Soviets and 25,000 prisoners from other ethnic groups were deported to Auschwitz in World War II.

Of these, 1.1 million were killed, and 90 per cent of those killed were Jews.

Sources

• Crux
• Image: The Observer

April 16th was Benedict XVI's birthday.

He turned 89.

Other trivia about Benedict:

• He loves cats, and had two of his own. One was a stray which he found in Rome.
• He still has the stuffed animals his mother made for him when he was a child.
• His favorite meal is Bavarian potato ravioli with pancake strips. Read still more intersting little know facts about Benedict

• The appointment in 2007, followed by the swift fall from grace, of a new Archbishop of Warsaw who had an ambiguous relationship with the Soviet-era secret police.
• The eerily similar appointment in 2009 of an Austrian bishop who had suggested Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for the wickedness of New Orleans, and who was likewise gone within days.
  Lifting the excommunications of four traditionalist Catholic bishops in 2009, including one who denied that the Nazis used gas chambers, with little apparent regard for how that move would be perceived.
• The surreal "Boffo case" from 2010, pivoting on the former editor of the official newspaper of the Italian bishops. (If you don't know the story, it would take too long to explain, but trust me … Hollywood screenwriters couldn't make this stuff up.)
• The Vatileaks scandal of 2011-12, which featured revelations of financial corruption and cronyism, and which ended with the conviction and pardon of the pope's own former butler for stealing confidential documents.

Less spectacularly, there was a chronic sense during the Benedict years that the pope's administrative team, led by Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, was occasionally out of its depth. Decisions were delayed, and when they came, the logic for how things shook out was sometimes opaque.

Frustration over a perceived "management deficit" helped pave the way for election of a new pope in March 2013, with a reputation as someone who could clean out the stables and get the Vatican under control. (Whether or not that's actually happening today is an utterly different conversation.)

Australia's George Pell, today Pope Francis' finance chief, was among those calling for a house-cleaning three years ago. Continue reading

• John L. Allen Jr is the editor of Crux.

Franciscan Sr Katarina Schuth told the National Catholic Reporter she sees a subtle shift in her classroom in St Paul Seminary in Minnesota.

In recently assigned reflection papers, three of her first-year students wrote about priestly ministry and the poor.

"That's the first in a long time that has been mentioned," she said.

If Francis has a long pontificate, the results will show in seminaries, as more new bishops are appointed, she added.

Seminarians, said Sr Schuth, often model their view of priesthood on their diocesan bishop, a phenomenon she has observed for the past three decades studying seminarians.

Sr Schuth said Francis's influence might diminish the trend towards a "restorationist" view of priesthood among seminarians.

Restorationist outlooks focus on traditional liturgical rubrics and emphasise priests asserting authority.

These have been a feature of seminary life, particularly during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, the NCR article stated.

Sr Schuth noted that recent seminarians have embraced a viewpoint focusing on the specific powers of priesthood, with a diminishment of focus on collaborating with lay people.

There has been a strong emphasis on separating men out for priestly ministry, with separate education and religious training.

Due to a shortage of priests, many seminarians with such viewpoints will be parish priests not long after they are ordained.

Sr Schuth said lay ministers in parishes are getting older, and are more likely to be women. It is a mix which will challenge those men who are ordained in the near future.

But she said that the more seminarians are exposed to Francis, they are more likely to admire his approach.

For example, seminarians at the North American College in Rome, who have regular contact with Francis, tend to have highly positive reactions to his style.

"You can't have contact with him and not like him," she said about Francis.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Catholic World Report

"Today is Benedict XVI's birthday," Francis tweeted on April 16.

"Let us remember him in our prayers and thank God for giving him to the Church and the world."

Continue reading

This makes it somewhat ironic that, during his pontificate, Benedict XVI found himself delivering a series of tightly argued addresses, all of which emphasized the West's need to return to right reason in the fullest sense of that word.

These speeches and their implications for law and democracy are explored in a collection of essays entitled Pope Benedict XVI's Legal Thought: A Dialogue on the Foundation of Law, edited by Marta Cartabia and Andrea Simoncini.

The flight from right reason, so apparent in Western culture and Christian life since the 1960s, has long worried many Jewish and Christian scholars.

The 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, for instance, can only be fully understood against the background of efforts by some moral theologians—many of whom, such as the late Josef Fuchs SJ, were not coincidentally from the German-speaking world—to maintain the language of natural law while infusing it with consequentialist and proportionalist argumentation to legitimize positions clearly contrary to longstanding Christian teaching concerning exceptionless moral absolutes.

Perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of Pope Benedict's efforts to restore reason to its proper place in the West and religious intellectual life more generally was his willingness to go, as another pope often says, to "the peripheries" to make his case. Put another way, to the extent that what some people call "the Benedict Option" involves Christians disengaging from a thoroughly secularized public square and declining to present arguments based on public reason, the sixteenth Pope Benedict was not inclined to embrace this approach. Continue reading

Sources

• The Witherspoon Institute, from an article by Samuel Gregg, Research Director at the Acton Institute.
• Image: Ignatius Insight

The retired pontiff accepted the invitation of Francis to attend the opening.

Benedict will not take part in the whole official inauguration of the Jubilee of Mercy.

But he will be present in the basilica atrium for the rite of opening, following the Eucharistic celebration.

The opening of the Holy Door is intended to symbolically illustrate the idea that the Church's faithful are offered an "extraordinary path" toward salvation during the time of jubilee.

Continue reading

The prayer reads: "Let us also pray for the Jews: that our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all men."

The prayer was revised by Benedict XVI in 2008 after he permitted wider celebration of the Mass in the older form with his apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum.

Previously the prayer had included references to the "blindness" of Jewish people and their "immersion in darkness".

But the prayer remains different from the Novus Ordo version introduced after the Second Vatican Council.

This reads: "Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant."

Archbishop Kevin McDonald, chairman of the England and Wales bishops' Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations, said the difference had caused "great confusion and upset in the Jewish community".

He said: "The 1970 prayer which is now used throughout the Church is basically a prayer that the Jewish people would continue to grow in the love of God's name and in faithfulness of his Covenant, a Covenant which - as St John Paul II made clear in 1980 - has not been revoked."

"By contrast the prayer produced in 2008 for use in the extraordinary form of the liturgy reverted to being a prayer for the conversion of Jews to Christianity."

He said the English and Welsh bishops had "added their voice" to that of the German bishops, who had already asked for the prayer to be amended.

Archbishop McDonald said: "Such a change would be important both for giving clarity and consistency to Catholic teaching and for helping to progress Catholic-Jewish dialogue."

Joseph Shaw, president of the Latin Mass Society, said the request for a change is surprising as the extraordinary form version reflects the theology and imagery of 2 Corinthians 3:13-16.

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Summorum Pontificum
• Image: St Patrick Parish

Kai Diekmann, editor-in-chief of Bild Zeitung, visited the former Pope at his residence inside the Vatican on October 15.

Benedict, 88, greeted Diekmann with a warm, two-handed handshake.

"He is there on the doorstep, our Pope," Diekmann wrote.

"Bright-eyed, smiley, leaning on a Zimmer frame. He is wearing a white cassock and a simple pair of brown sandals on his feet.

"Ratzinger is in good spirits, wide-awake, no signs of weariness. He sits on the sofa: the weariness that was visible when he announced his resignation before a gathering of cardinals seems miles away," the German editor wrote.

Diekmann presented Benedict with a small artwork by German artist Albert Klink.

Benedict XVI took it in his hands, ran his hands over it several times and smiled, confiding that that through that piece of art he could feel all the closeness and affection of his fellow countrymen.

An article about the meeting described aspects of Benedict's residence.

"A small reception hall, a wooden staircase that leads up to the first floor. The sitting room is welcoming and bright, there is a white leather sofa and a simple seat.

"A book case that reaches the ceiling, a flat-screen TV with a DVD player and some religious icons on the walls.

"A coffee table and a piano with a black-and-white photo of his brother Georg."

After the meeting with Diekmann, Benedict travelled by a small golf-cart-like vehicle to pray at a Lourdes Grotto in the Vatican Gardens.

This is a part of his daily routine.

Sources

• Vatican Insider
• Image: Fr Ray's Blog

This was reported by Italy's Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family) Catholic magazine last week.

No pope has ever testified for the beatification of another, the magazine stated.

John Paul I died 37 years ago after being pope for just 33 days, following the death of Blessed Pope Paul VI.

He was succeeded by St John Paul II

Continue reading