By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — While youth ministry and education programs must be updated to meet the needs of young people today, the church’s outreach still must be based on love, concern and spiritual guidance, Pope Francis said.
Writing to members of the Salesian religious orders marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of St. John Bosco, the pope said, “The world has changed much in these two centuries, but the spirit of young people has not: young men and women still are open to life and to an encounter with God and with others.”
Without proper assistance, he said, their ideals and aspirations place them at risk of “discouragement, spiritual anemia and marginalization.”

Pope Francis greets a young woman as he leads a meeting with young people along the waterfront in Asuncion, Paraguay, July 12. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

In his letter dated June 24 and posted on the Salesian order’s website in mid-July, Pope Francis told the Salesian priests, brothers and sisters that they must look at “the resources the Holy Spirit raises up in situations of crisis,” and not just the ways modern culture “injures” the young.
For example, he said, Salesian outreach to young people must “follow the paths of new means of social communications and of intercultural education among people of different religions or in developing countries or in places marked by migration.”
The challenges present in Turin, Italy, in the 19th century — challenges which led St. John Bosco to found his order and his schools — he said, “have taken on a global dimension: idolatry of money, inequality that breeds violence, ideological colonization and the cultural challenges found in urban contexts.”
The key to helping young people today, he said, is the same as it was in St. John Bosco’s time: love, “understood as a love demonstrated and perceived, where kindness, affection, understanding and participation in the life of the other are expressed.”
Don Bosco insisted his schools and technical training centers have a family atmosphere, he said, one in which the instructor was a “father, teacher and friend of the young” and where there was a “climate of joy and celebration” with “plenty of space for singing, music, and theater” and time set aside for recreation and sports.
“Don Bosco will help you not disappoint the deepest aspirations of the young: their need for life, openness, joy, freedom and a future;their desire to work together to build a more just and fraternal world, promote development for all peoples, to safeguard nature and environments for life,” Pope Francis said.

By Cindy Wooden and Barbara Fraser
QUITO, Ecuador (CNS) – Although still thousands of miles from his birthplace in Argentina, Pope Francis made a homecoming of sorts July 5 when he landed in Ecuador, greeted by cheering crowds and the sights and sounds of South America.
After a 12-hour flight from Rome, the pope participated in a brief welcoming ceremony at Quito’s Mariscal Sucre Airport, telling government dignitaries, bishops and special guests that his pastoral work before becoming pope had taken him to Ecuador many times.
“Today, too, I have come as a witness of God’s mercy and of faith in Jesus Christ,” he said.
Mercy and faith, he said, have shaped Latin American culture for centuries, contributing to democracy and improving the lives of countless millions of people.
“In our own time, too, we can find in the Gospel a key to meeting contemporary challenges,” the pope said, including respecting national, ethnic, religious and cultural differences and fostering dialogue.
The pope’s visit followed a period of public protests over Ecuadorean government policies. Initially triggered by proposed inheritance and capital gains taxes, the protests also have targeted what even some of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s supporters describe as his heavy-handed approach.
Christian values, the pope said, should motivate citizens to promote the full participation of all people in their nation’s social, political and economic life “so that the growth in progress and development already registered will ensure a better future for everyone, with particular concern for the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters to whom Latin America still owes a debt.”
The program for the pope’s July 5-12 tour of Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay was punctuated with formal meetings with government officials and with large public Masses, but it also was filled with visits to the poor, the sick and the elderly, and prisoners.
“Ecuador loves life,” Correa told the pope at the airport ceremony, noting that the constitution protects life from the moment of conception. “It establishes recognizing and protecting the family as the basic core of society and commits us deeply to caring for ‘our common home,’” referring to the environment with the same words Pope Francis used in his encyclical, “Laudato Si’.”
Correa said Ecuador’s was the “first constitution in the history of humanity to grant rights to nature.” Twenty percent of the country is protected in parks and reserves, Correa told the pope.
Some environmental and human rights organizations in Ecuador have questioned Correa’s commitment to environmental safeguards, as conflicts have erupted over plans for open-pit mining and expanded oil and gas exploration and production.
Walking the red carpet at the airport, Pope Francis was greeted by dozens of children and young people dressed in a wide variety of traditional clothes. Correa told the pope that his country is culturally diverse, with a mixed-race majority, as well as 14 indigenous peoples, including two nomadic groups that continue to shun contact with the outside world.
Correa said that “the great social sin of our America is injustice. How can we call ourselves the most Christian continent in the world if we are also the most unequal, when one of the most repeated signs of the Gospel is sharing bread?”
During the flight from Rome, Pope Francis only briefly addressed the 70 members of the media traveling with him. He thanked them for their work, which “can do so much good.” Instead of answering their questions – his practice usually only on flights back to Rome – he walked down one aisle of the Alitalia plane and up the other, greeting each person.
(Copyright © 2015 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)

By Laura Ieraci
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Girls must be educated in preparation for great responsibilities in the church and the world, said Pope Francis.
“Today, it is very important that women are sufficiently valued and can take their rightful place in the church and in society,” he said June 26, during an audience with a delegation of the International Catholic Conference of Guiding.
Girl Scouts of the USA leaders Anna Maria Chavez and Kathy Hopinkah Hannan were among the delegation.
While faith has been a part of Girl Guiding, called Girl Scouting in the United States, since its inception more than 100 years ago, the international Catholic conference was only formed in 1965. It marked its 50th anniversary in Rome, with an international conference, June 25-30, under the theme “Live as a Guide the joy of the Gospel.” More than 200 women attended.
In a world where ideologies contrary to God’s design for marriage and family are spreading, the pope said, “it is not only about educating young girls in the beauty and greatness of their vocation as women” in a right relationship with men and respecting the differences between men and women. But it is also to educate them “to take on important responsibilities in the church and in society,” he said.
The pope said Guiding has a “notable role” to play in the promotion and education of women in countries where women “are still in a position of inferiority, even exploited and treated badly.”
He noted the importance the movement places on the environment and on being in contact with nature. He said his recent encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home,” speaks of how “education is essential in transforming mentalities and habits in order to overcome the worrying challenges facing humanity regarding the environment.”
The Guiding program is “well armed” to contribute to this goal, he said. He urged Guiding members to continue to be “awakened to the presence and the goodness of the Creator in the beauty of the world.”
“It is a new lifestyle, more in line with the Gospel,” which they can then convey to others, he said.
He also asked the movement “not to forget” to include the possible vocation to consecrated life in its program, noting that many vocations to religious life came through Guiding in the past.
He also urged leaders to consider meetings with the wider international Guiding movement, comprised of women of different faiths and cultures, as valuable opportunities for “sincere and true dialogue, with respect for each other’s convictions” and “in the serene affirmation” of their Catholic faith and identity.
(Copyright © 2015 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)

By Carol Glatz
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNS) – Whether you still stick to books or magazines or get everything online, Pope Francis said all media should encourage and edify – not enslave.
“Back in my day – the Stone Age – when a book was good, you read it; when the book was bad for you, you chucked it,” he told hundreds of youth in Sarajevo June 6.
The pope ended his one-day visit to the capital of this Balkan nation meeting with young people of different religions and ethnicities who volunteer together with the archdiocesan St. John Paul II Center. He set aside his prepared text and told the young people he would rather take some questions.
One young man said he read that the pope had stopped watching TV a long time ago, and wanted to know what led him to making that choice.
The pope said he decided back in the middle of 1990 to stop because “one night I felt that this was not doing me good, it was alienating me” and he decided to give it up.
He did not give up on movies, however.
When he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he would go the archdiocesan television station to watch a recorded film he had picked out, which didn’t have the same isolating effect on him, he said.
“Obviously, I am from the Stone Age, I’m ancient!”
Times have changed, he said, and “image” has become all important. But even in this “age of the image,” people should follow the same standards that ruled back “in the age of books: choose the things that are good for me,” he said.
Those who produce or distribute content, like television stations, have the responsibility of choosing programs that strengthen values, that help people grow and prepare for life, “that build up society, that move us forward, not drag us down.”
Viewers have the responsibility of choosing what’s good, and changing the channel where there is “filth” and things that “make me become vulgar.”
While the quality of content is a concern, it is also critical to limit the amount of time one is tied to the screen, he said.
If “you live glued to the computer and become a slave to the computer, you lose your freedom. And if you look for obscene programs on the computer, you lose your dignity,” he said.
Later, in response to a journalist’s question on the papal plane from Sarajevo back to Rome, the pope said the online or virtual world is a reality “that we cannot ignore; we have to lead it along a good path” and help humanity progress.
“But when this leads you away from everyday life, family life, social life, and also sports, the arts and we stay glued to the computer, this is a psychological illness,” he said.
Negative content, he said, includes pornography and content that is “empty” or devoid of values, like programs that encourage relativism, hedonism and consumerism.
The pope said some parents do not allow their children to have a computer in their own room, but keep it in a common living space. “These are some little tips that parents find” to deal with the problem of unsuitable content, he said.
(Editor’s Note: A related video can be viewed at https://youtu.be/pta1-9YVR5M.)

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who will be beatified in San Salvador May 23, has become a symbol of Latin American church leaders’ efforts to protect their flocks from the abuses of military dictatorships.
However, his life and the 35 years it took the Vatican to recognize him as a martyr also reflect decades of theological and pastoral discussion over the line dividing pastoral action from political activism under repressive regimes.
Archbishop Romero was assassinated March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass in the chapel of Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador, the city he served as archbishop for three years.
The intense turmoil in El Salvador coincided with a period of intense questioning within the church as pastors in countries under military dictatorships, civil war or communist oppression tried to find the best ways to be faithful to their mission of ministering to their flocks while defending their rights.
The Vatican made frequent calls in those years for priests and bishops, especially in Latin America and in Africa, to stay out of partisan politics. But repressive regimes easily decided churchmen who denounced widespread human rights abuses were meddling in politics.
Jesuit Father James R. Brockman, author of a biography of the archbishop, like many historians and supporters of Archbishop Romero’s beatification, said that when Bishop Romero was chosen as archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was known as a “conservative” and there was a widespread assumption that he would not directly challenge the country’s rulers. His background was not that of a political activist.
Oscar Romero was born Aug. 15, 1917, in Ciudad Barrios, the second of seven children. Although not considered poor, the family did not have electricity or running water in their home, and the children slept on the floor. Oscar began working as a carpenter’s apprentice when he was 12 years old, but then decided to enter the minor seminary and continue his formal education.
Once he finished his studies at the San Miguel minor seminary, he transferred to the major seminary in San Salvador and was sent to Rome where he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He was ordained to the priesthood April 4, 1942, in the chapel of the Latin American College.
Returning to El Salvador in 1944, he worked as a parish priest in the Diocese of San Miguel, later becoming secretary of the diocese, a position he held for 23 years. During that time — long before becoming archbishop of San Salvador and famous for the radio broadcasts of his homilies – he convinced local radio stations to broadcast his Sunday Masses and sermons so that Catholics in more rural areas could listen and grow in their faith.
In 1970, when the priest was 52, Pope Paul VI named him an auxiliary bishop of San Salvador. Four years later, he became bishop of Santiago de Maria, the diocese that included his hometown of Ciudad Barrios. Social and political tensions in El Salvador were growing worse; when five farmworkers were hacked to death in June 1975 by members of the Salvadoran National Guard, then-Bishop Romero consoled the families and wrote a letter of protest to the government.
“Before Romero was archbishop for a month, his deeply admired friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, was killed,” wrote Thomas Quigley, a former official at the U.S. bishops’ conference, in the foreword to the English translation of Archbishop Romero’s audio diary.
Father Grande’s strong advocacy for the poor as he ministered in rural communities in northern San Salvador strongly influenced Archbishop Romero, say many of those who knew him. The Jesuit used his pulpit to denounce actions of the government and of the death squads in his country, as well as the violence used by some opponents of the government.
After consultation with the priests’ council, Archbishop Romero “ordered only one public Mass celebrated in the archdiocese on the Sunday following Grande’s funeral,” Father Brockman wrote in the introduction to the diary. “It turned out to be the largest religious demonstration in the nation’s history and for many a profound religious experience.
But it also led to a serious clash with the Vatican’s ambassador, the papal nuncio, who had pressured Romero not to hold the single Mass lest the government think it provocative. It was the beginning of an enduring lack of understanding and support on the part of the nuncio.”
Archbishop Romero continued having his Sunday Masses and homilies broadcast by radio and, increasingly, he used them as opportunities to explain to Salvadoran citizens what was going on in their country and what their response as Christian should be. He always condemned violence and he urged conversion, particularly on the part of members of the government death squads.
Quigley wrote that Archbishop Romero’s homilies “rarely lasted less than an hour and a half” and included his account of “the events of the week,” both good and bad, “proclaiming the good news of the liberating Gospel and, with the prophets of old, denouncing the evils of the day.”
His homilies and his letters to government officials made him a frequent target of death threats and often put him at odds with several of the other Salvadoran bishops and even with Vatican officials who believed he had crossed the line into politics and was placing the church’s pastoral work in jeopardy.
He lived in a small residence on the grounds of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador and frequently celebrated Mass, vespers and benediction there with the sisters who ran the hospital. He was shot and killed in the chapel, a day after he challenged army soldiers for killing their fellow citizens.

Prayer of Pope Francis for the Jubilee

Lord Jesus Christ,
you have taught us to be merciful like the heavenly Father, and have told us that whoever sees you sees Him.
Show us your face and we will be saved.

Your loving gaze freed Zacchaeus and Matthew from being enslaved by money; the adulteress and Magdalene from seeking happiness only in created things; made Peter weep after his betrayal, and assured Paradise to the repentant thief.
Let us hear, as if addressed to each one of us, the words that you spoke to the Samaritan woman:
“If you knew the gift of God!”

You are the visible face of the invisible Father,
of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy: let the Church be your visible face in the world, its Lord risen and glorified. You willed that your ministers would also be clothed in weakness in order that they may feel compassion for those in ignorance and error: let everyone who approaches them feel sought after, loved, and forgiven by God.

Send your Spirit and consecrate every one of us with its anointing, so that the Jubilee of Mercy may be a year of grace from the Lord, and your Church, with renewed enthusiasm, may bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to captives and the oppressed, and restore sight to the blind.

We ask this through the intercession of Mary, Mother of Mercy, you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever.
Amen.

By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Holy Year of Mercy will be an opportunity to encourage Christians to meet people’s “real needs” with concrete assistance, to experience a “true pilgrimage” on foot and to send “missionaries of mercy” throughout the world to forgive even the most serious of sins, said Archbishop Rino Fisichella.
The yearlong extraordinary jubilee also will include several individual jubilee days, such as for the Roman Curia, catechists, teenagers and prisoners, said the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, the office organizing events for the Holy Year of Mercy.
During a news conference at the Vatican May 5, Archbishop Fisichella unveiled the official prayer, logo, calendar of events and other details of the special Holy Year, which will be celebrated from Dec. 8, 2015, until Nov. 20, 2016.
The motto, “Merciful Like the Father,” he said, “serves as an invitation to follow the merciful example of the Father who asks us not to judge or condemn but to forgive and to give love and forgiveness without measure.”
Pope Francis announced in March his intention to proclaim a holy year as a way for the church to “make more evident its mission to be a witness of mercy.”
One way the pope wants to show “the church’s maternal solicitude” is to send out “missionaries of mercy” – that is, specially selected priests who have been granted “the authority to pardon even those sins reserved to the Holy See,” the pope wrote in “Misericordiae Vultus,” (“The Face of Mercy”), the document officially proclaiming the Holy Year.
Archbishop Fisichella said the priests will be chosen on the basis of their ability to preach well, especially on the theme of mercy, and be “good confessors,” meaning they are able to express God’s love and do not make the confessional, as Pope Francis says, like “a torture chamber.”
The priests will also have to “be patient” and have “an understanding of human fragility,” the archbishop said.
Bishops can recommend to the council priests from their own dioceses to serve as missionaries of mercy, he said, and priests themselves can submit their request to serve, he said.
When a priest volunteers, however, the council will confer with his bishop to make sure he would be “suitable for this ministry” and has the bishop’s approval to serve temporarily as a missionary of mercy, he said.
The archbishop emphasized the importance of living the Holy Year as “a true pilgrimage” with the proper elements of prayer and sacrifice.
“We will ask pilgrims to make a journey on foot, preparing themselves to pass through the Holy Door in a spirit of faith and devotion,” he said.
More than a dozen individual jubilee celebrations will be scheduled in 2016, such as a jubilee for consecrated men and women Feb. 2 to close the Year of Consecrated Life; a jubilee for the Roman Curia Feb. 22; a jubilee for those devoted to the spirituality of Divine Mercy on Divine Mercy Sunday April 3; and separate jubilees for teenagers; for deacons; priests; the sick and disabled; and catechists.
A jubilee for “workers and volunteers of mercy” will be celebrated on Blessed Mother Teresa of Kolkata’s feast day Sept. 5 and a jubilee for prisoners will be celebrated Nov. 6.
Archbishop Fisichella said the pope wants the jubilee for inmates to be celebrated not only in prisons, but also with him in St. Peter’s Basilica. He said the council is discussing the possibility with government authorities and is not yet sure if it can be done.
The Vatican is asking bishops and priests around the world to conduct “similar symbolic gestures of communion with Pope Francis” and his vision of reaching out to those on the margins.
“As a concrete sign of the pope’s charitable love,” he said, “effective measures will be taken to meet real needs in the world that will express mercy through tangible assistance.”
At the news conference, the council distributed copies in several languages of the Holy Year prayer and logo, which features Jesus – the Good Shepherd – taking “upon his shoulders the lost soul, demonstrating that it is the love of Christ that brings to completion the mystery of his incarnation culminating in redemption,” the archbishop said.
The image, created by Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik, also shows one of Jesus’ eyes merged with the man’s to show how “Christ sees with the eyes of Adam, and Adam with the eyes of Christ.”
The council has joined with the United Bible Societies to distribute to pilgrims 1 million free copies of the Gospel of Mark; the texts will be available in seven languages.
The Jubilee of Mercy has an official website in seven languages at www.im.va; a Twitter handle @Jubilee_va; a Facebook page; and accounts on Instagram, Flickr and Google+.