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.

According to the Vatican report released last week, Pope John Paul II received warnings about McCarrick from Vatican officials and New York Cardinal John O'Connor in 1999.

Two years later, McCarrick was installed as archbishop of Washington, D.C.

John Paul was beatified in 2011, six years after his death, and was made a saint three years later.

It's not just popes: The church needs more time to examine any person's life.

The people of Argentina, for example, wanted to canonise Eva Peron immediately after her death in 1952.

At the time, thankfully, the mandatory waiting period before the canonization process could begin was 50 years. Though she is still revered by many Argentines, Peron's reputation has been clouded in recent years by accusations that she and her husband harboured Nazis after World War II.

John Paul reduced the waiting period from 50 to five years because he wanted to canonise individuals who were still relevant to today's generation. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, waived even that for John Paul's canonization in response to popular demand.

As a result, when John Paul was canonised a mere nine years after his death, independent historians did not have access to the secret files of the Vatican, so it was impossible for outsiders to judge his cause.

As more information is disclosed, questions are raised about his actions.

Canonising popes is a special problem because their canonizations are more about ecclesial politics than sanctity.

Those pushing for sainthood are their fans who want their pope's legacy to be reinforced. It is a vote for continuity against change, as elevating a pope to sainthood makes it more difficult to question and reverse his policies.

Politically, it is difficult to oppose the canonization of a pope because opposition is portrayed as disloyalty. Those who openly or secretly oppose canonization are usually proponents of change.

As a compromise, two popes are sometimes made saints at once: Pope John XXIII was made a saint the same day John Paul was in April of 2104. Progressives liked John while conservatives liked John Paul.

The practice, meant to soothe friction between factions in the church, goes back to Pope Calixtus and Hippolytus (the first anti-pope) in the third century.

Legend has it that these opponents, whose supporters fought openly in the streets of Rome, reconciled after being sent to the Sardinian tin mines by the pagan Roman authorities.

Both were honoured as saints by the church of Rome in an effort to unify the church.

The joint canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II similarly brought together liberal and conservative factions who had been at odds since Vatican II, which was initiated by John.

I would not be surprised to see Popes Francis and Benedict canonised on the same day within 10 years of their deaths.

The politics of canonizing popes aside, saints are supposed to be models for Catholics and others to imitate.

How can anyone who is not pope really model him or herself after a pope — unless you are a cardinal who wants to be a pope?

My preferred candidates for canonization are laypeople, especially married couples and young people.

I would canonise the Rwandan students at Nyange Catholic Girls' School who were beaten and killed by Hutu militants in 1997 when they refused to separate into Hutu and Tutsi groups.

Their witness against genocide and for solidarity would mean more to young people than any pope.

Were these young women perfect?

Not likely, but they don't need to be: Saints are not perfect; they are also sinners.

We need to remember that St Peter denied he knew Jesus.

But when scandals like McCarrick's become known, it makes people question the whole system. Which isn't always a bad thing.

When Josemaría Escrivá, the controversial founder of Opus Dei, was canonised in 2002, a Jesuit wag responded, "Well, that just proves everyone goes to heaven."

• Thomas Reese SJ is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, and a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America. First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

We address you as you approach this year's national meeting in Baltimore because we know there is nowhere left to hide.

It's over.

All the manipulations and contortions of the past 33 years, all the attempts to deflect and equivocate — all of it has brought the church, but especially you, to this moment.

It's over.

Even the feds are now on the trail. They've ordered that you not destroy any documents. The Department of Justice is conducting a national criminal investigation of how you've handled the clergy sex abuse scandal.

It is a point in our history without precedent.

We want you to know that you aren't alone in this moment, you've not been abandoned. But this time it must be different.

This time it won't be easy.

From fable to sacred text, we know how this goes.

The point is reached where all realize the king wears no clothes, the righteous accusers read the writing in the sand and fade away, the religious authorities receive the Master's most stinging rebukes.

As a class of religious rulers, the loudest among you have become quite good at applying the law and claiming divine authority in marginalizing those who transgress the statutes.

The prolonged abuse scandal would suggest, however, that you've not done very well taking stock of yourselves.

We have no special insight into why this moment — the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the downfall of Theodore McCarrick — has so captured the public imagination and pushed the church to this outer limit of exposure and vulnerability.

There are theories, not least of which is that the opportunists among us are attempting to use this moment to bring down the only pope who has actually dethroned bishops and a cardinal for their crimes and indiscretions.

But that's an issue for another time.

The reality, we all know, is that it has been going on for a long time.

The first national story appeared across four pages of this publication in the summer of 1985.

The worst of it occurred during the pontificate of the hastily sainted John Paul II, a giant on the world stage, but a pastor who let wolves roam his own flock.

His idealized concept of heroic priesthood apparently left him incapable of hearing the truth from credible witnesses, including the few bishops who dared disturb that idealized world with troubling reports.

He promoted to the end Marciel Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, and a persona who came to represent the worst of the abuse scandal.

Maciel, an accomplished sycophant, kept scrutiny at bay with his ability to spread a lot of young priests and a lot of money around the Vatican.

The point beyond dispute is that we are at a moment in U.S. church history — and perhaps in the history of the global church — without precedent.

This is not about debatable matters — celibacy or the filioque clause, or the primacy of Scripture or whether the Earth is the center of the universe or whether women should be allowed ordination or any of the hot button issues that have kept us roiling and at each others' throats these past decades.

This, instead, is about a rot at the heart of the culture entrusted with leadership of the Catholic community.

A rot so pervasive that it has touched every aspect of the community's life, disrupting all of the certainties and presumptions about who we are and who you are that helped hold this community together.

Those who worked so ardently in the past to enable you — the faithful, so betrayed, who just couldn't believe you would engage in such a deliberate cover up. Continue reading

• NCR editorial staff
• Image: Onyx Truth

All three were sins against the life and unity of the community. They resulted in excommunication, separation from the community, until a penitential restoration of communion.

By the time, many centuries later, when I was learning the catechism, it seemed as if every transgression were mortal, and therefore cause for damnation, unless there were extenuating circumstances.

One of those mortal sins was violation of the church's rule of abstinence from meat on Fridays. In order to make a living, the hot dog vendor in my mostly Catholic neighborhood sold "Friday hot dogs" at a discounted price — buns with condiments, but no sausages in them.

That ended in 1966, when Pope Paul VI loosened the restrictions.

I recall seeing a cartoon at that time that showed two devils in hell.

One was asking the other, "What are we supposed to do with all the people who are here for eating meat on Friday?"

That devil comes to mind as I think of the upcoming canonization of Pope Paul VI.

That devil's concern was one that Paul shared. "If we change things, what will that mean for what we've said before and those who believed us?"

Pope Paul VI rightly deserves to be remembered with veneration as the pope who carried forward the work of the ecumenical council convened by Pope John XXIII, Vatican II.

Paul brought the council to its close and began the post-conciliar adaptation of the church to its new reality.

However, Pope Paul is probably most remembered for his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae that barred the use of "artificial" methods of controlling birth.

In his encyclical, he went against the recommendations of the commission of experts he had convened to advise him on the issue.

Among those who encouraged him in this was the Polish bishop who later became Pope John Paul II.

Paul's reason for not changing the long-held teaching that various forms of contraception are sinful was concern for the image of the church.

His was the cartoon devil's concern: "If we change things, what will that mean for what we've said before and those who believed us?"

The pope felt that a change in the traditional discipline would undermine the trust people had in the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church.

And in his mind, that would be the same as undermining trust in the church.

As he soon learned, Pope Paul's move backfired.

People relied upon biological and social scientific facts and their own experience more than upon a papal say-so to justify ignoring his encyclical.

The pope's mistake was to over-identify the church with its teaching authority rather than with the People of God and Christ.

The result was a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences. Instead of confirming the authority of the centralized magisterium, Humanae Vitae initiated a period of questioning, defiance and, ultimately, marginalization of church authority.

We are in the midst of that period.

Ironically, the very situation that Pope Paul hoped to head off became the major result of his action.

After Pope Paul was gone, the response of Pope John Paul II to the erosion of respect for centralized Roman authority was to fight back by appointing bishops who would make loyalty to Humanae Vitae and the magisterium the hallmark of their ministry.

Once again, however, the law of unintended consequences went into effect and has provoked what is considered by many to be the worst crisis in the Western church since the Reformation that began half a millennium ago, the cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy.

Those "John Paul bishops" were so focused upon Rome and the magisterium that they failed to see the victims in front of them.

Rather, they engaged in cover-ups in order to protect the image, authority (and finances) of the church from further disrespect and attacks.

The only way out of this mess is to admit that Catholicism is not basically about popes and bishops, rules and teachings.

It is about Jesus Christ, the love of God incarnate in a human being. And the church itself is not an institution, but the People of God.

Like all people, we use institutions to regulate our lives, but the institution is not our definition.

Then, we have to live personally and communally as if we really believed that is who we are.

That will not magically heal the unintended consequences of leaders' actions in the past. It will take decades, maybe centuries, to undo the harm that well-intentioned men have inflicted upon the church.

I wonder if John Paul's refusal to recognize and deal with the abuse situation has angels asking one another what they should do with St. John Paul now that we know how much responsibility he bears for the mess we are in.

• Father William Grimm, MM, is the publisher of ucanews.com and is based in Tokyo.

Every crisis demands the same, including the sex abuse crisis.

So, while it is always a mistake to try and figure out what the crazies at Church Militant will do or say, it is important that we monitor what is being said by seemingly responsible people to make sure we are all keeping each other honest.

In a recent essay at The Weekly Standard, Mary Eberstadt wrote "The Elephant in the Sacristy, Revisted," a kind of reprise of an article she first wrote in 2002.

"Back then, like today, the plain facts of the scandals were submerged in what we now call whataboutism," she writes.

"According to these evasive maneuvers, the wrongdoing was supposedly explained by reference to clericalism, celibacy, sexual immaturity, and other attributes invoked to avoid the obvious."

And, for her, then as now, the key to understanding the scandal was:

A cluster of facts too enormous to ignore, though many labor mightily to avert their eyes. Call it the elephant in the sacristy. One fact is that the offender was himself molested as a child or adolescent. Another is that some seminaries seem to have had more future molesters among their students than others. A third fact is that this crisis involving minors—this ongoing institutionalized horror—is almost entirely about man-boy sex.

First, it is always an honor to be mentioned alongside Frs. Spadaro and Martin, as well as Professor Faggioli.

But, while I can't presume to speak for them, I can assure Ms. Eberstadt that the reason I called Vigano's filthy lies a "putsch" attempt was because he not only mixed just enough truth amidst the lies to tantalize many journalists for a week, and apparently still has her believing him, but he called for the pope to resign.

In the face of the fact that Francis is the only pope who ever really took action against McCarrick, this call for his resignation was self-evidently an attempt at triggering a putsch, the modern day ecclesial equivalent of the shot fired by the cruiser Aurora to trigger the October Revolution in 1917.

This is what Viganò and his crowd of admirers want, for Francis to go.

"The Catholic laity is far from blameless in this hour.

"The scandals might have been reduced long ago if the laity's rejection of church teaching on birth control hadn't led to collusion of mutual misuse," Eberstadt writes.

"Many priests winked at the laity's breaking the law against contraception and many laity tacitly returned the favor by not worrying overmuch about their priest and some of his friends."

She is actually on to something important here.

It is true that a sense of unreality and deceit surrounds the subject of sexual ethics within the Catholic Church, but that is a consequence of the deeper problem, namely, that the church's teaching on sex has been for too long presented in the language of neo-scholasticism and with no apparent connection to the Gospel.

And, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, and precisely among writers like Eberstadt, sexual ethics has been the primary focus of Catholic identity, giving the subject an outsized importance within the church.

Eberstadt is not alone.

In a column at First Things, and distributed through syndication, George Weigel takes a swipe at Cardinal Blase Cupich, albeit without naming him.

Weigel mistakenly compares a Cupich interview with a press conference given by Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, in 2002.

Cupich did not say, as Castrillon Hoyos did, that the pope had better things to worry about than sex abuse.

The Chicago cardinal said the pope had better things to worry about than the self-serving, score-settling "testimony" offered by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a man Weigel had previously dubbed the best nuncio to the U.S. ever.

Weigel then goes on to quote at length and approvingly from a letter issued by Hartford Archbishop Leonard Blair to his priests and seminarians. Blair wrote:

The anger and disillusionment of our Catholic people is only matched by my own, and no doubt yours as well. After all the massive effort that has been made since 2002 to rid the Church of this evil and to try to bring healing to victim survivors, how is it possible that we find ourselves confronting the same perception of the Church, and of us as priests and bishops, as if nothing has changed?

But, why, then, if he is so angry and disillusioned, and so resolved to do what it takes to eradicate this evil, why has not Archbishop Blair taken the simple step of publishing the names of those priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse against a minor?

Why does Weigel attend to his words and not his deeds?

And why should anyone think Weigel — defender of serial molester Fr. Marcial Maciel, friend of enabler Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, biographer of the pope who set the pattern of dismissing victims and covering up crimes — credible on this subject?

You can spend time checking to see which essayists quote which bishops, and whether those bishops have actually done anything to put the sex abuse scandal behind us.

You can examine their arguments and decide whether they make sense to you or not.

But, here is a shortcut, a quick way to tell if they are serious: Do they even mention St. Pope John Paul II ?

He was the one who not only set the pattern for ignoring victims, but who led the Vatican in the '80s and '90s, when bishops were routinely told to reinstate priests, not to be too tough on "poor father."

He was the one who promoted Theodore McCarrick not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. Continue reading

• Image: Indian Express

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 addition to this message, Pope Francis used Twitter in the days following its release to focus more attention on nonviolence.

On 3 January he tweeted: "May nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions."

The next day he tweeted: "To be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence," and he reiterated this message on 5 January, tweeting: "May charity and nonviolence govern how we treat one another."

His message and his tweets came after a conference on nonviolence took place at the Vatican in April, organized jointly by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International, at which the participants called on the pope to write an encyclical or "other teaching document" on nonviolence and to reject the just war tradition. It is likely that Pope Francis's World Day of Peace message was, in part, a response to this conference's appeal.

Pope Francis's message was not the first time a pope exhorted Catholics to nonviolence. Pope St. John Paul II forcefully opposed violence and praised those who opposed injustice nonviolently. And at the Angelus on 18 February 2007, Pope Benedict XVI referred to Jesus's exhortation to "Love your enemies" (Luke 6:27) as "the magna carta of Christian non-violence" and spoke about nonviolence as:

"not merely tactical behaviour but a person's way of being, the attitude of one who is so convinced of God's love and power that he is not afraid to tackle evil with the weapons of love and truth alone."

That said, Pope Francis's World Day of Peace message is the first papal document focused specifically on nonviolence, and draws attention to it in a more sustained manner than previous papal documents. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics article by Gregory K Hillis, Associate Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University.
• Image: Patheos

Like I said, I wasn't born yet, and I've discovered some incredible facts about the assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square while reading Fatima Mysteries, a new and beautiful book by Ignatius Press. Here's some facts I've not read anywhere else.

1. Twenty thousand people were there. The scene that day must have been traumatic for so many people, but especially those close to the incident — 20,000 people!

2. The shooter wasn't that clever. He had a passport in his pocket with a fake name and was quickly identified as a man sentenced to death just a year earlier in Turkey.

3. He apparently spared a child's life. Perhaps it was a merciful act, perhaps another motive. But John Paul II reached out and cuddled an eighteen-month-old.

The shooter, Mehmet Ali Agca, waited for the child to be returned to his mother before pulling the trigger.

4. The weapon was popular among assassins. The gun was produced en masse by the Nazis when they seized a Belgian factory. The Browning Hi Power 9mm was powerful, light, reliable, well-made. Hence, a favorite for toting assassins.

5. John Paul II said "no" to a bulletproof vest. A year earlier he was quoted in Ireland saying that "danger is an occupational hazard." That's just plain awesome.

6. Two shots were taken. Boom, boom. One after the other. Agca was "certain he would kill the pope."

7. A sad ending for the Swiss Guard. A young Swiss Guard member Alois Estermann threw himself on the pope. He was practically famous and became the commander of all the Guards in a future year.

In another future year, he and his wife were murdered and the murderer committed suicide. Pray for them all, now. Lord have mercy on us poor sinners. Continue reading

Sources

• EpicPew article by Shaun McAfee, founder of EpicPew
• Image: Marist Messenger