By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The best way to ensure evangelization is about Jesus and not about oneself is to spend time in prayer and especially in Eucharistic adoration, Pope Francis told members of the Oblates of St. Joseph.

“Young people do not need us; they need God,” the pope told members of the order’s general chapter during a meeting at the Vatican Aug. 26.

“The more we live in his presence, the more we are able to help them encounter him without unnecessary protagonism and having only their salvation and full happiness at heart,” the pope said.

People today, but especially young people, he said, live in a world where what seems to count most is what is on the outside: one’s appearance, achievements or adventures.

“But a life lived all ‘outside’ leaves the inside empty like someone who spends all his time on the street and lets his home fall into disrepair for lack of care and love,” the pope said. Instead, “make your hearts, your communities (and) your religious houses places where the warmth of familiarity with God and among brothers and sisters can be felt and shared.”

The life of every Christian, but especially of a member of a religious order, must be anchored in “a daily ‘being’ with Jesus,” he said. “Let’s not delude ourselves: without him we do not stand, none of us. We each have our own frailties, and without the Lord to sustain us, we would not stand.”

Participating in the sacraments, listening to and meditating on Scripture and spending time before Jesus in the Eucharist are essential parts of religious life, he said.

“I want to emphasize this: Sometimes we neglect adoration, the prayer of adoration, silence before the Lord,” Pope Francis said. The priests and brothers in the order should imitate St. Joseph, their patron, and the way he responded to “the immense gift of having the very Son of God made man in his home: by being with him, listening to him, talking to him and sharing with him the life of every day.”

The pope also asked members of the general chapter to think about their sins and notice how “when you fell into sin it was because you were not close to the Lord. That is always the case. Those who are close to the Lord immediately cling to him and do not fall.”

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Each Christian and the whole Catholic Church must hold fast to the promise that “nothing is impossible for God,” especially when facing difficulties, Pope Francis said.

Resuming his weekly general audiences Aug. 7 after a six-week summer break, the pope returned to his series of audience talks about the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church.

“Without the Holy Spirit, the church cannot keep moving, the church doesn’t grow, the church cannot preach,” he told pilgrims and visitors sheltered from the summer heat in the air-conditioned Paul VI Audience Hall.

Two women holding signs and shouting for the church to formally declare bullfighting a sin interrupted the reading of a passage from the Bible at the beginning of the audience. Security escorted them out of the audience hall.

Looking at how the Holy Spirit enlivens and assists the church, Pope Francis said people often wonder, “How is it possible to proclaim Jesus Christ and his salvation to a world that seems to seek only well-being in this world?”

The answer, he said, is given in the Acts of the Apostles: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses.”

Notice, the pope said, the words are almost the same as those the Angel Gabriel said to Mary when she asked how it would be possible that she would conceive and bear God’s son.

“What is said about the church in general also applies to us, to every baptized person,” Pope Francis told the crowd. “In life, all of us sometimes find ourselves in situations beyond our strength, and we ask ourselves: ‘How can I cope with this situation?’ It helps, in such cases, to repeat to ourselves what the angel said to the Virgin: ‘With God nothing will be impossible.’”

The pope prayed that everyone would find the strength to keep going “with this comforting certainty in our hearts: ‘With God nothing will be impossible.’”

“If we believe this, we will perform miracles,” he said. “With God nothing will be impossible.”

By Justin McLellan
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Heaven is not a secure vault protected from outsiders but a “hidden treasure” that is reached by cultivating virtues, Pope Francis said.

Before praying the Angelus in St. Peter’s Square on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul June 29, the pope reflected on Jesus giving St. Peter, the first pope, the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

“The mission that Jesus entrusts to Peter is not that of barring the doors to the house, permitting entry only to a few select guests, but of helping everyone to find the way to enter, in faithfulness to the Gospel of Jesus,” Pope Francis said after celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Heaven, he added, is “for everyone. Everyone, everyone, everyone can enter.”

The pope said that St. Peter “received the keys to the kingdom not because he was perfect, no, he is a sinner, but because he was humble, honest and the Father had given him sincere faith.”

Even after many trials and setbacks, the Apostle Peter was the first to experience for himself “the joy and freedom that come from meeting the Lord,” and the first “to understand that authority is a service in order to open the door to Jesus.”

The following day, Pope Francis again appeared in the window of the Apostolic Palace to keep his usual Sunday appointment of praying the Angelus with the faithful. He focused on the Gospel theme of inclusivity by reflecting on the day’s Gospel reading from St. Mark in which a woman is healed after touching Jesus’ cloak and a girl is resurrected after Jesus took her by the hand.

Highlighting the importance of physical contact in both healings, the pope asked, “Why is this physical contact important?”

“It is because these two women are considered impure and cannot, therefore, be physically touched – one because she suffers from bleeding and the other because she is dead,” he said. “Yet, Jesus allows Himself to be touched and is not afraid to touch.”

By carrying out the physical healing, Jesus “challenges the false religious belief that God separates the pure, placing them on one side, from the impure on another,” the pope said. “Instead, God does not make this kind of separation because we are all his children.”

He added that impurity “does not come from food, illness, or even death; impurity comes from an impure heart.”

Pope Francis urged Christians to take to heart the lesson from the day’s Gospel reading, that “in the face of bodily and spiritual sufferings, of the wounds our souls bear, of the situations that crush us, and even in the face of sin, God does not keep us at a distance.”

“God is not ashamed of us; God does not judge us,” he said. “On the contrary, He draws near to let Himself be touched and to touch us, and He always raises us from death.”

By Justin McLellan

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis said he hopes the spirit of openness and dialogue embodied in synodality remain the norm for the Catholic Church after the current Synod of Bishops comes to a close.

The pope told the moderators of church movements June 13 that his hope is that “synodality remain as the permanent way of acting in the church at all levels, entering in the hearts of all pastors and faithful until it becomes a shared ecclesial style.”

The “most important thing from this synod on synodality is not so much dealing with this or that issue,” the pope said. “The most important thing is the parish, diocesan and universal journey in synodality.”

In March, Pope Francis decided that the most controversial issues raised at the first assembly of the Synod of Bishops, including the role of women in the church and guidelines for training priests, will be examined by 10 study groups and sidelined from main conversations at the next synod assembly. The groups are scheduled to present a preliminary report to the synod’s second assembly in October and to give the pope a final report on their work by June 2025.

Some 200 participants in a conference of moderators of associations of the faithful, ecclesial movements and new movements met with Pope Francis as part of a yearly meeting at the Vatican organized by the Dicsatery for Laity, the Family and Life; the theme this year was “The Challenge of Synodality for Mission.”

The meeting “aims to highlight some examples of synodal structures and practices already implemented in associations and movements that can be an example and stimulus for the whole Church,” a statement by the dicastery said, such as ” sharing experiences of faith within small groups or small communities, community discernment, co-responsibility of lay and ordained ministers in assuming roles of governance, involvement of married couples and young people in evangelization (and) charitable and social action.”

Pope Francis said that humility and an openness to other people and ideas are “synodal virtues,” and he told participants that ecclesial movements are meant to be at the service of the church and not seen as “a superior thing” within the church.

“Closed movements should be canceled,” he said; “they are not ecclesial.”

The pope said it is a temptation for members of the church to remain in a “closed circle,” to be “convinced that what we do is good for everyone, to defend, perhaps without realizing it, ‘group’ positions, prerogatives or prestige.”

Yet synodality asks Christians to see God’s presence at work “even in people we do not know, in new pastoral ways,” he said, as well as to “let ourselves be struck, even wounded, by the voice, experience and suffering of others: of brothers and sisters in the faith and of all the people close to us.”

Pope Francis asked the leaders of movements to remember that synodality involves thinking about what God wants from individuals and the church, so an absolute requirement is to not “take for granted that we are attuned to God” but rather “convert ourselves to think according to God and not according to men.”

“Let us remember that the protagonist of the synodal journey is the Holy Spirit, not us,” the pope said. “He alone teaches us to listen to God’s voice, individually and as the church.”

By Justin McLellan
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Living out the missionary dimension of the faith never means trying to forcefully convert people to Catholicism, Pope Francis said.

“The Christian mission is not transmitting some abstract truth or religious conviction, much less proselytizing – still less,” he told the national directors of the Pontifical Mission Societies May 25.

Rather, “it is first and foremost enabling those we meet to be able to have the fundamental experience of God’s love, and they will be able to find it in our lives and in the life of the church if we are shining witnesses to it, reflecting a ray of the Trinitarian mystery,” the pope said.

Participants gathered at the Vatican from more than 120 countries across five continents for the general assembly of the Pontifical Mission Societies.

To illustrate the perils of proselytism, the pope recalled an experience he had at a World Youth Day in which a woman belonging to what he described as an “ultra” Catholic group gloated to him about converting the two young people she was with.

“I looked at her in the eyes and I said, ‘And who will convert you?’” the pope said.

Regarding “this mission of conversion, there are religious groups that carry around a list of conversions; this is terrible,” he said.

In addition to giving money to support the church’s missions, Pope Francis said Catholics must find new ways of engaging with and promoting the church’s missionary projects.

“All missionary activity is creative” since it is rooted in Christ’s charity, he said. “With inexhaustible imagination, such charity inspires new ways of evangelizing and serving others, especially the poorest, and include the customary collections taken for the universal funds of solidarity with the missions.”

While Catholics should promote those collections, they must also “explore new ways of encouraging the participation of individuals, groups and institutions who wish to support the church’s missionary endeavors as an expression of their gratitude for the graces received from the Lord,” the pope said.
The pope said a spirituality of missionary communion “is the foundation of the church’s current synodal journey.”

“The call to communion implies a synodal style: walking together, listening to each other, engaging in dialogue,” he said. “This expands our hearts and fosters that universal outlook emphasized at the founding of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith,” a branch of the Pontifical Mission Societies which promotes missionary spirituality and universal solidarity with missions through prayer and the distribution of funds.