Lunch with Francis. Close to God s people. From the heart to the hands. The many homilies of Shakespeare. The world needs IN ENGLISH WEEKLY EDITION

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1 Price 1,00. Back issues 2,00 L O S S E RVATOR E ROMANO WEEKLY EDITION Unicuique suum IN ENGLISH Non praevalebunt Forty-ninth year, number (2459) Vatican City Friday, August 2016 The General Audience on the journey of mercy From the heart to the hands PAGE 3 With Polish Bishops in Krakow before World Youth Day Close to God s people On the first day of his visit to Poland, Wednesday, 27 July, Pope Francis met privately with 117 of the nation s bishops in the Basilica dedicated to Sts Stanislaus and Wenceslaus in Krakow. During their extensive conversation, the Holy Father touched upon many pressing concerns for the Church, including: the danger of imbuing children with gender theory; the crisis of wars fuelled by financial interests; the importance of the parish as the basis of ecclesial life; and the need to treasure the elderly. PAGES 6-8 The Bard and Mercy The many homilies of Shakespeare SI LV I A GUIDI ON PA G E 15 The Pontiff in Assisi The world needs forgiveness At the Domus Sanctae Marthae with 21 Syrian refugees arrived from Lesbos Lunch with Francis On Thursday, 11 August, Pope Francis had lunch at the Domus Sanctae Marthae with the 21 Syrian refugees whom he had welcomed in Rome. The refugees described the encounter as a moment of celebration a message of peace and hope so great that we cannot even find the words to express it. Suhila Ayiad conveyed these thoughts to Pope Francis on behalf of the group. Before the meal, the Pope prayed for these families, that the Lord give us peace in our land. Afterwards he listened to their dramatic stories. Francis has welcomed five families, along with three others, also Syrian, who hope to be soon reunited with their loved ones. The entire group, which includes nine minors, came from the refugee camp of Lesbos. Nineteen are Muslims and two are Christians one Syro-Orthodox and one Catholic. The first group (three families, comprised of 12 people) came on the airplane with Francis on 16 April. The second group (two families plus the three) arrived on 16 June. The menu was simple: pasta and tomato sauce, then fish, and french fries for the little ones, served on a U-shaped table. The exchange of gifts was festive: Francis was given an album of illustrations from the children. The drawings depict the beauty of having a home without forgetting the horrors of war. The words I have been saved left the Pope visibly moved, as did the illustrations of Syria devastated by violence. Eight-year-old Masa drew a butterfly to represent the Pope. Because, Masa told him, you brought us to safety, to peace, on your wings. Francis had also prepared a gift for each child which he gave to them one by one, thanking them for having confidence in him and in his colleagues. You came here, he CONTINUED ON PA G E 2 Archbishop emeritus of Krakow Cardinal Macharski dies For the Feast of St Cajetan Bread and work PAGE 4 PAGE 17 Understanding Amoris Laetitia Prime numbers and infinity Parolin on the Pope in the Caucasus Creative fidelity Fatal attraction A peacemaker PAGE 10/11 RODRIGO GUERRA LÓPEZ ON PA G E 12 CARLO MARIA PO LVA N I ON PA G E 16 MAU R I Z I O FO N TA N A ON PA G E 20

2 page 2 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number VAT I C A N BULLETIN AUDIENCES Thursday, 4 August Cardinal Stanisław Ryłko, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace Bishop Guillermo Rodríguez- M e l g a re j o of San Martín, Argentina RE L AT I O N S WITH STAT E S The Holy Father appointed Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio, titular Archbishop of Montemarano, as Apostolic Nuncio in Poland. Until now he has been Apostolic Nuncio in India and in Nepal (6 Aug.). PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SO CIAL SCIENCES The Holy Father appointed as Ordinary Member of the Academy Prof. Paolo Carozza, Lecturer in Law and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA (6 Aug.). NECROLO GY Archbishop James Martin Hayes, Archbishop emeritus of Halifax- Ya r m o u t h, Canada, at age 92 (2 A u g. ). Bishop Mansueto Bianchi, Bishop emeritus of Pistoia, Italy, at age 66 (3 Aug.). Bishop Salvador Quizon Quizon, titular Bishop of Feradi minus, Auxiliary Bishop emeritus of Lipa, the Philippines, at age 91 (5 Aug.). Bishop Ercole Lupinacci, Bishop emeritus of the Eparchy of Lungro for Italo-Albanians of the Byzantine Rite, at age 82 (6 Aug.). Bishop Edward Kevin Daly, Bishop emeritus of Derry, Ireland, at age 82 (8 Aug.). The Pope s horror at the brutal acts of violence in Quetta A senseless and brutal act of violence, as termed by Pope Francis, was carried out in a hospital in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, Pakistan. The massacre, in which 90 people were killed, occurred on Monday, 8 August. The Pontiff expressed condolences in a telegram signed by Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, which stated that the Pope was deeply saddened by the attack in Pakistan and sent his heartfelt condolences to the relatives of the victims, to the authorities and to the entire nation, while he offered the assurance of his prayers for the many injured victims. Bishop Vincent Huang Shoucheng dies On Saturday, 30 July, at 11 a.m., Bishop Vincent Huang Shoucheng of Xiapu (Funing), in the Fujian Province, died at the age of 93. On 15 May he was taken to hospital as his health had worsened. However, since his health improved slightly he wanted to spend his last moments at home, where he passed a w a y. Bishop Huang was born on 23 July 1923 in Kangcuo near Fu an, Fujian, into a traditional Catholic family. He attended the Minor Seminary of Luojiang and completed his studies in philosophy and theology at the Major Seminary in Fuzhou. On 26 June 1949 he was ordained a priest by Bishop Tommaso Niu Huiqing, Apostolic Administrator of Funing. Following his ordination he taught at Funing Minor Seminary. He then served in parish ministry in Xiapu and in other parishes where he proclaimed the Gospel of Christ with apostolic zeal. Of his over 60 years in the priesthood, Bishop Huang spent 35 in prison, in forced labour and under house arrest, during which he gave heroic witness to the faith, with unconditional loyalty to the Successor of Peter and in profound communion with the universal Church. On 9 January 1985 he received episcopal ordination from Bishop Paul Liu Shuhe of Yixian, after being appointed Coadjutor to Bishop Xie Shiguang of Xiapu. On 20 August 2005, Bishop Huang succeeded Bishop Xie, becoming Ordinary of Xiapu (Funing). On 27 December 2008 Bishop Huang ordained as his coadjutor, Msgr Vincenzo Guo Xijin, thereby ensuring his succession in the diocese. The late prelate, although unrecognized by the civil authorities, carried out with zeal his pastoral ministry, he held meetings with the clergy and women religious, promoted the pastoral care of vocations and attentively accompanied the formation of priests, religious and lay faithful. Under his leadership, the Diocese of Xiapu (also known as the Diocese of Funing/Mindong) grew considerably. He is remembered by those who knew him as a great pastor, who was courageous, patient, humble, full of faith and dedicated to evangelization. The diocese now has about 90 thousand Catholics with over 60 priests, 200 nuns and 300 consecrated lay women, engaged in evangelization. His funeral Mass took place on 2 August in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary, attended by thousands of the faithful who wished to pay tribute to Bishop Huang s mortal remains. The Holy Father s grief for victims of the tropical storm in Mexico Pope Francis expressed his affection to the dear people of Mexico hit by Typhoon Earl, which claimed at least 45 victims, particularly in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. On Wednesday, 9 August, in a telegram addressed to Archbishop Franco Coppola, Apostolic Nuncio in Mexico, and signed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, the Pontiff assured his prayers in suffrage for those who lost their lives as well as his closeness to their families and to the people stricken by the typhoon. At the same time Francis asked that the Lord sustain the spirit of the authorities and of the people of Mexico, and awaken solidarity in everyone. CONTINUED FROM PA G E 1 Lunch with Francis said, without knowing where you were going. He also shared that he had been struck by the atmosphere of joy that these families are living in, expressed by the irrepressible energy of the little ones: especially Ahmad, born on 1 January 2015, and Riad, just over two years old, who got more than a chuckle out of Francis. After thanking the group for their visit, the Pope also asked them to pray for him. The event began at 12:25 and lasted for about an hour and 40 minutes. Archbishop Angelo Becciu, Substitute of the Secretariat of State, and Domenico Giani, Commandant of the Vatican Gendarmerie Corps, also attended, along with Lucia Cintia and Stefano De Santis, the two agents directly involved with the practical considerations of the refugees. Also on hand were representatives of the community of Sant Egidio, which made the welcome possible: its founder, Andrea Riccardi was accompanied by Daniela Pompei and Cecilia Pani, who provide services to migrants, and by Moustafa Chahade and Youssef Atais, who play a role as mediators for the refugees. L OSSERVATORE ROMANO WEEKLY EDITION Unicuique suum IN ENGLISH Non praevalebunt Vatican City e d. e n g l i s o s s ro m.v a w w w. o s s e r v a t o re ro m a n o.v a GI O VA N N I MARIA VIAN Editor-in-Chief Giuseppe Fiorentino Assistant Editor Mary M. Nolan Editor Editorial office via del Pellegrino, Vatican City telephone , fax TIPO GRAFIA VAT I C A N A EDITRICE L OS S E R VAT O R E ROMANO don Sergio Pellini S.D.B. Director General Photo Service photo@ossrom.va w w w. p h o t o.v a Advertising Agency Il Sole 24 Ore S.p.A. 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3 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 3 At the General Audience the Pope speaks about the journey of mercy From the heart to the hands Mercy is a journey which starts in the heart and ends in the hands. To the many faithful gathered in the Paul VI Hall for the General Audience on Wednesday, 10 August, Francis commented on the narrative from the Gospel of Luke (7:11-17), on the resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain. The following is a translation of the Pope s Catechesis which was given in Italian. Dear Brothers and Sisters, Good morning! The passage from the Gospel of Luke that we have listened to (7:11-17) presents us with a truly great miracle of Jesus: the resurrection of a young man. However, the heart of this narrative is not the miracle, but Jesus tenderness toward the mother of this young man. Here, mercy takes the form of great compassion for a woman who had lost her husband and now is accompanying her only son to the cemetery. This deep sorrow of a mother moves Jesus and causes him to perform the miracle of re s u r re c t i o n. In introducing this episode the Evangelist dwells on many details. At the gate of the small town of Nain a village two large groups meet. They come from opposite directions and have nothing in common. Jesus, followed by the disciples and by a large crowd, is about to enter the residential area, while coming out of it is a procession accompanying a dead man, with his widowed mother and many people. At the gate the two groups brush by each other, each going its own way, but it is then that St Luke notes Jesus feelings: when the Lord saw her [the woman], he had compassion on her and said to her: Do not weep. And he came and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still (vv ). Great compassion guides Jesus actions: he stops the procession, touches the bier and, moved by profound mercy for this mother, decides to confront the reality of death, so to speak, face to face. And he will confront it definitively, face to face, on the Cross. During this Jubilee, it would be a good thing if, in passing through the Holy Door, the Door of Mercy, pilgrims were to remember this episode of the Gospel, which occurred at the gate of Nain. When Jesus sees this mother in tears, she enters his heart! Every one arrives at the Holy Door carrying their own life, with its joys and suffering, plans and failures, doubts and fears, in order to present it to the Lord s mercy. We are certain that, at the Holy Door, the Lord comes near to meet each one of us, to bring and offer his powerful consoling words: Do not weep! (v. 13). This is the Door of the encounter between the pain of humanity and the compassion of God. Crossing the threshold we fulfil our pilgrimage into the mercy of God who, as to the deceased young man, repeats to all: I say to you, Lord. Today too the Church recognizes that she is visited by God. For this reason, by setting out for the Door of Mercy, each one is able to set out for the door of the merciful heart of Jesus: He indeed is the true Door that leads to salvation and restores us to new life. Mercy, both in Jesus and in ourselves, is a journey which starts in the heart in order to reach the hands. What does this mean? Jesus looks at you, he heals you with his mercy, he says to you: Arise!, and your heart is new. What does it mean to make a journey from the heart to the hands? It means that with a new heart, with the heart healed by Jesus I can perform works of mercy through the hands, seeking to help, to heal the many who are in need. Mercy is a journey that starts in the heart and ends in the hands, namely in the works of mercy. I have said that mercy is a journey that goes from the heart to the hands. In the heart, we receive the mercy of Jesus who forgives us everything, because God forgives everything and lifts us up, gives us new life and infects us with his com- us try to feel this word in our heart: Arise!. The powerful word of Jesus can make us rise again and can bring about in us too the passage from death to life. His word revives us, gives us hope, refreshes weary hearts, opens us to a vision of the world and of life which transcends suffering and death. The inexhaustible treasure of God s mercy is inscribed for each one on the Holy D oor! Touched by the word of Jesus, the dead man sat up, and began to speak. And he gave him to his mother (v. 15). This phrase is so beautiful: it shows Jesus tenderness: he gave him to his mother. The mother recovers her son. Receiving him from Jesus hands she becomes a mother for the second time, but the son who is now restored to her is not the one who received life from her. Mother and son thus receive their respective identities thanks to the powerful word of Jesus and to his loving gesture. Therefore, especially in the Jubilee, Mother Church receives her children, recognizing in them the life given by the grace of God. It is due to this grace, the grace of Baptism, that the Church becomes mother and that each one of us becomes her child. Before the young man, revived and restored to his mother, fear seized them all; and they glorified God, saying, A great prophet has arisen among us! and God has visited his people! (v. 16). What Jesus does is thus not only a saving action intended for the widow and her son, or a gesture of goodness limited to that town. In Jesus merciful care, God meets his people, in Him all of Go d s grace appears and will continue to appear to mankind. Celebrating this Jubilee, which I wished to be lived in all the particu- arise! (v. 14). To each of us he says: Arise!. God wants us to stand upright. He created us to be on our feet: for this reason, Jesus compassion leads to that gesture of healing, to heal us, of which the key phrase passion. From that forgiven heart and with the compassion of Jesus, is: Arise! Stand up, as God created lar Churches, that is in all the the journey to the hands begins, you!. Standing up. But Father, we churches of the world, and not only namely through the works of mercy. fall so often Onward, arise!. in Rome, it is as if all the Church A bishop, the other day, told me This is Jesus word, always. In spread throughout the world were passing through the Holy Door, let joined in one hymn of praise to the CONTINUED ON PA G E 4 The Holy Father makes a private visit to Carsoli and Borgo San Pietro In the footsteps of Saint Francis On Tuesday morning, 9 August, Pope Francis made a surprise visit to the Convent of St Francis in Carsoli in the province of L'Aquila. He then went to the Convent of St Philippa Mareri in Borgo San Pietro, located in Petrella Salto, Rieti. On this spiritual journey in the footsteps of St Francis, the Pope was welcomed and accompanied by Bishop Domenico Pompili of Rieti. The Convent that the Holy Father visited in Carsoli dates back to the time of St Francis. He met with the Benedictine Sisters of Reparation of the Holy Face of Our Lord Jesus Christ, where he celebrated Mass. Later that afternoon, Francis went to pray at the Shrine of Borgo San Pietro, where the body of St Philippa Mareri is entombed. Here the Pope met with the community of Franciscan Sisters, with whom he shared a reflection on the beauty and importance of the mission of consecrated women in the Church.

4 page 4 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number Pope Francis visited him in the hospital in Krakow on Thursday, 28 July Cardinal Franciszek Macharski dies Polish Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, Archbishop emeritus of Krakow, died on Tuesday, 2 August. Five days earlier, the 89-year-old prelate received a visit from Pope Francis at the university hospital in Krakow, where the Cardinal was in critical condition. The Pope gave him a rosary as a gift. The previous day, meeting with Polish bishops, the Pope had asked them to pray for the ailing Cardinal. Upon learning of the Cardinal s death, the Pontiff sent a telegram to Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, Archbishop of Krakow. The following is a translation of the Pope s telegram along with the late Cardinal s biography. To my Venerable Brother Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz Metropolitan Archbishop of Krakow I was sad to learn of the death of Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, Archbishop emeritus of Krakow. I join you, Dear Brother, the Presbyterate and the faithful of the Church of Poland in the prayer of thanksgiving for the life and the pastoral commitment of this most worthy Minister of the Gospel. Iesu, in te confido! Jesus, I trust in you! this episcopal motto guided his life and his ministry. Today, in the Jubilee Year of Mercy, it has become an eloquent invocation which proclaims the fulfillment of the work that the Lord had already entrusted to him at Baptism, introducing him into the ranks of those sealed with His Redeeming Blood, and later together with the gift of priesthood, when He sent him forth with the task of sanctifying the People with the word and with the grace of the sacraments. He carried out this mission zealously as pastor, professor, rector of the Seminary, until the day in which the Lord called him to assume the task of the legacy of St Stanislaw and of his immediate predecessor Karol Wojtyła, today St John Paul II, in the Episcopal See of Krakow. With trust in Divine Mercy he carried out this work as father to the priests and to the faithful entrusted to his care. He guided the Church in Krakow in the difficult period of political and social transformation, with wisdom, with a healthy detachment from reality, promoting respect for each person, for the good of the community of the Church, and above all keeping faith alive in the hearts of mankind. I am grateful to Providence, that I was able to visit him during my recent journey to Krakow. In the last phase of life he was greatly tried by suffering which he accepted with peace of mind. Even in this trial he remained a faithful witness to trust in the goodness and the mercy of God. He will thus remain in my memory and prayers. May the Lord welcome him into his glory! To you, Venerable Brother, to the Cardinals and Bishops of Poland, to the relatives of the Deceased, and to all the faithful of Poland I impart my heartfelt blessing: in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. From the Vatican, 2 August 2016 FRANCIS Franciszek Macharski was born on 20 May 1927 in Krakow, where he also spent his childhood. During the Second World War, under the German occupation, he worked as a labourer, like Karol Wojtyła. In 1945, immediately after the liberation, he entered the Major Seminary of Krakow, enrolling in the faculty of theology at the Jagiellonian University. After completing his studies in philosophy and theology he was ordained a priest on 2 April 1950 by Cardinal Adam Sapieha, Archbishop of Krakow. For six years he served as Vicar in the parish of Kozy, in the area of Bielsko-Biała. Then in 1956, he transferred to the Catholic Uni- CONTINUED FROM PA G E 3 that in his cathedral and in other churches he had made entry and exit doors of mercy. Why did you do this? Because one door is to enter by, to ask forgiveness, and to receive Jesus mercy; the other is the door of mercy to exit by, in order to take mercy to others, with our works of mercy. This bishop is intelligent! Let us also do the same with the journey that goes from the heart to the hands: let us enter the church through the door of mercy, to receive the forgiveness of Jesus, who tells us: Arise! Go, go! ; and with this Go! on foot let us leave through the exit door. It is the Church going forth: the journey of mercy which goes from the heart to the hands. Make this journey! After the Audience the Pope said: I greet the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors taking part in to day s Audience, particularly those from England, Malta, Indonesia versity of Fribourg, Switzerland, to complete his theological studies, earning a degree in pastoral theology in Upon his return to Krakow, he was appointed spiritual father of the seminary and taught pastoral theology at the Pontifical theological faculty. In 1970, the new Cardinal Archbishop Wojtyła appointed him rector of the seminary. In 1971 he served as an auditor in the Second Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the theme: Ministerial priesthood and justice in the world. In 1977 he was appointed by Wo j t y ła as canon of the metropolitan Chapter of the Cathedral of Wa w e l. From the heart to the hands and the United States of America. With prayerful good wishes that the present Jubilee of Mercy will be a moment of grace and spiritual renewal for you and your families, I invoke upon all of you joy and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ. I hope that every one may live this Extraordinary Holy Year by fostering the culture of encounter, recognizing the presence of the Lord s flesh particularly in the poor and in the needy. Lastly I address a greeting to young people, to the sick and to newlyweds. Last Monday we recalled the figure of St Dominic de Guzmán, whose Order of Preachers is celebrating the eighth centenary of its foundation. May the enlightened word of this Great Saint inspire you, dear young people, to Macharski always had a good relationship of cooperation and friendship with his archbishop. Among other things he accompanied him on numerous international journeys, from Canada to the United States of America, from France to Germany, as well as to Italy. It was from this close bond that Karol Wojtyła who had been elected Pope John Paul II on 16 October 1978 decided to appoint Macharski as his successor to the See of St Stanislaw on 29 December The Polish Pope personally ordained him a bishop in the Vatican Basilica, in the presence of countless pilgrims who had come from Krakow for the occasion. Jesus, I listen to and to live Jesus teachings; may his inner strength sustain you, dear sick people, in times of discomfort; and may his apostolic devotion remind you, dear newlyweds, of the importance of Christian education in your family. trust in you was the motto chosen by the Cardinal, in the spiritual perspective of divine mercy of which Sr Faustina Kowalska was an apostle. Well-known in Poland, and also abroad, as a man of culture, an academic and author, Macharski had always dedicated particular attention to the promotion of priestly and religious vocations, as well as to the theological and spiritual formation of seminarians. Even before being appointed Archbishop of Krakow, he contributed, through his thought and experience, to the Polish Episcopate, as a member of various commissions. In this context, he paid particular attention to the laity: in the Plenary Assembly of Polish Bishops, which was held in Warsaw in February In fact, he was entrusted with the presidency of the commission of the apostolate of the laity, of which he had previously been secretary under the leadership of Cardinal Wojtyła from 1966 to He was always a point of reference for all of Polish society as a capable high-profile speaker with a simple and direct style. He maintained a special bond with John Pa u l II, whom he welcomed on eight visits to Krakow between 1979 and Macharski took part in various assemblies of the Synod of Bishops, playing a key role as Delegate President to the Second Special Assembly for Europe in Additionally, he served on the Councils of the Second Section of the Secretariat of State; of the Congregations for Bishops, for the Evangelization of Peoples, for the Clergy, for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and for Catholic Education. On 3 June 2005, after over 26 years as Archbishop, he left the leadership of the Archdiocese of Krakow to Stanisław Dziwisz, who had served for 39 years as Private Secretary to Karol Wojtyła.

5 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 5 Jesus reminds us today that the expectation of the eternal beatitude does not relieve us of the duty to render the world more just and more liveable. These were Pope Francis words at the Angelus on Sunday, 7 August, addressing the faithful present in St Peter s Square. In his reflection the Holy Father commented on the passage from the Gospel of Luke (12:32-48) in which Jesus speaks to his disciples about the attitude to assume in view of the final encounter with him. The following is a translation of the address that Pope Francis gave in Italian. At the Angelus the Holy Father recalls that life should be a diligent vigil of exp ectation A call for vigilance Dear Brothers and Sisters, Good morning! In the text of today s Gospel (Lk 12:32-48), Jesus speaks to his disciples about the attitude to assume in view of the final encounter with him, and explains that the expectation of this encounter should impel us to live a life full of good works. Among other things he says: Sell your possessions, and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth dest ro y s (v. 33). It is a call to give importance to almsgiving as a work of mercy, not to place trust in ephemeral goods, to use things without attachment and selfishness, but according to God s logic, the logic of attention to others, the logic of love. We can be so attached to money, and have many things, but in the end we cannot take them with us. Remember that the shroud has no p o ckets. Jesus lesson continues with three short parables on the theme of vigilance. This is important: vigilance, being alert, being vigilant in life. The first is the parable of the servants waiting for their master to return at night. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes (v. 37): it is the beatitude of faithfully awaiting the Lord, of being ready, with an attitude of service. He presents himself each day, knocks at the door of our heart. Those who open it will be blessed, because they will have a great reward: indeed, the Lord will make himself a servant to his servants it is a beautiful reward in the great banquet of his Kingdom He himself will serve them. With this parable, set at night, Jesus proposes life as a vigil of diligent expectation, which heralds the bright day of eternity. To be able to enter one must be ready, awake and committed to serving others, from the comforting perspective that, b eyond, it will no longer be we who serve God, but He himself who will welcome us to his table. If you think about it, this already happens today each time we meet the Lord in prayer, or in serving the poor, and above all in the Eucharist, where he prepares a banquet to nourish us of his Word and of his Body. The second parable describes the unexpected arrival of the thief. This fact requires vigilance; indeed, Jesus exhorts: You also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not exp ect (v. 40). The disciple is one who awaits the Lord and his Kingdom. The Gospel clarifies this perspective with the third parable: the steward of a house after the master s departure. In the first scene, the steward faithfully carries out his tasks and receives compensation. In the second scene, the steward abuses his authority, and beats Message of Justice and Peace for the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima Never again one against the other, never, never again!... Never again war!. Paul VI s call for peace before the General Assembly of the United Nations on 4 October 1965 echoed in the Cathedral of Hiroshima on Saturday, 6 August, at the end of the Mass celebrated for the 71st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. The words of Pope Montini who died 38 years ago on 6 August were at the heart of the message with which the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace wished to emphasize the importance of the commemorative ceremonies, joining in the prayer of solidarity and of hope raised by the Church of Japan. On behalf of the President, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, and all the members of Justice and Peace, the message was read by Dicastery Official Fr Michael Czerny, S J, who had travelled to Japan in order to join in a series of initiatives in memory of the tragic bombardment of 1945, which claimed an estimated 140,000 lives. In particular, Fr Czerny attended a two-day conference dedicated to disarmament and safety, sponsored in Tokyo by by the United Nations University and by Religions for Peace, the world conference established in 1970 in order to foster the contribution of various religions to the peace building process. He also took part in the interreligious meeting hosted by the Tendai Buddhist Community and in the programme of celebrations organized by the Diocese of Hiroshima, which concluded with the Mass on 6 August in the Cathedral. No to war and terrorism Coloured lanterns in Hiroshima in memory of the victims of the atomic bomb (Ansa) The message of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace underscored the coinciding anniversary of the Transfiguration of the Lord, which reveals the glory of Christ and demands a response of listening to Jesus Christ and of following him. The text quoted the words of Pope Francis, emphasizing that the L o rd s full adherence to the will of the Father makes his humanity transparent to the glory of God, who is Love and mercy. In this perspective the anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe offers a unique and special occasion for our prayerful commemoration. The message continued, encouraging prayer and action in solidarity with the victims of the atom bombs and of all wars and all terrorism around the world, and highlighting in particular the context of the Jubilee Year of Mercy inducted by Pope Francis. This Jubilee, it explains, gives each and every one of us the opportunity to revisit the sinful and sorrowful moments of our lives, not in order to be crushed and to despair, but in order to allow Go d s loving grace to enter the heart of each person with forgiveness and healing. Bernadette Lopez, Keep watch the servants, for which, upon the master s unexpected return, he will be punished. This scene describes a situation that is also frequent in our time: so much daily injustice, violence and cruelty are born from the idea of behaving as masters of the lives of others. We have only one master who likes to be called not master but Fa t h e r. We are all servants, sinners and children: He is the one Father. Jesus reminds us today that the expectation of the eternal beatitude does not relieve us of the duty to render the world more just and more liveable. On the contrary, this very hope of ours of possessing the eternal Kingdom impels us to work to improve the conditions of earthly life, especially of our weakest brothers and sisters. May the Virgin Mary help us not to be people and communities dulled by the present, or worse, nostalgic for the past, but striving toward the future of God, toward the encounter with him, our life and our hope. After the Angelus Prayer the Holy Father said: Dear brothers and sisters, unfortunately news of civilian victims of war continues to arrive from Syria, from Aleppo in particular. It is unacceptable that so many defenceless people even many children must pay the price of the conflict, the price of closing the heart and of the lack of will of the powerful for peace. Let us be close in prayer and solidarity with our Syrian brothers and sisters, and let us entrust them to the maternal protection of the Virgin Mary. Let us all pray a bit in silence and then recite a Hail Mary. I greet all of you, people of Rome and pilgrims from various countries! Quite a lot of flags are visible! Today various groups of young men and women are present. I greet you with great affection! I wish everyone a happy Sunday. Please do not forget to pray for me. Enjoy your lunch. Ar r i v e d e rc i!

6 page 6 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number On Wednesday afternoon, 27 July, the Pope s first day in Poland, the Holy Father met with Polish Bishops in Wawel Cathedral, Krakow. Inspired by several questions posed to him, the Holy Father decided to hold a discussion that touched upon various subjects, among them secularization, immigration, relations between bishops and priests, the elderly and parish life. The following is the English text of the dialogue which was held in Italian. POPE FRANCIS: Before beginning our dialogue, with the questions that you prepared, I would like to perform a work of mercy with all of you and to suggest another. I know that these days, with World Youth Day, many of you have been busy and so you couldn t go to the funeral of Archbishop Zimowski. It is a work of charity to bury the dead, so I would like us all together to say a prayer for Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski as a genuine sign of fraternal charity, that of burying a dead brother. Our Fa t h e r Hail Mary Glory be... Requiem aeternam Then, the other work of mercy I would suggest. I know that you are concerned about this: our dear Cardinal Macharski is very sick. At least stop by, because I think that you cannot see him, since he is unconscious. But at least stop by the hospital and touch the walls, as if to say: Brother, I am close to you. Visiting the sick is another work of mercy. I myself plan to go. Thank you. Now, someone has prepared the questions or at least sent them to me. I am ready. MAREK JĘDRASZEWSKI, Archbishop of Ło dź Holy Father, it seems that the faithful of the Catholic Church, and more generally all Christians in Western Europe, increasingly find themselves a minority in the midst of a modern, godless, liberal culture. In Poland, we are witnessing a profound clash, an enormous struggle, between faith in God on the one hand, and on the other a way of thinking and acting as if God did not exist. In your opinion, Holy Father, what kind of pastoral activity should the Catholic Church in our country undertake, so that the Polish people can remain faithful to its more than 1,000-year-old Christian tradition? Thank you. The Pope s meeting with Polish Bishops in Krakow before World Youth Day Close to God s people POPE FRANCIS: You are the Bishop of? ARCHBISHOP JĘDRASZEWSKI: Ło dź, where St Faustina began her journey, because there she heard Christ telling her to go to Warsaw to become a nun. The story of her life began in my city. POPE FRANCIS: You are very privileged! True, the dechristianization, the secularization of the modern world is powerful, very powerful. But there are also those who say that while it is powerful, there are also clear indications of religiosity, of a reawakening of the religious sense. This too can be dangerous. I believe that in this highly secularized world we have also the other danger, that of a gnostic spiritualization. Secularization makes it possible for us to indulge in a spiritual life which is a little gnostic. We remember that this was the first heresy in the Church the apostle John went after the gnostics, relentlessly! it consists in a subjective spirituality, without Christ. For me the bigger problem with secularization is dechristianization: removing Christ, removing the Son. I pray, I feel and that is all. This is gnosticism. There is another heresy fashionable nowadays, pelagianism, but let us for the moment disregard it and return to what I was saying [about dechristianization]. To find God without Christ. God but not Christ, people but not Church. Why? Because the Church is a Mother, who gives you life, and Christ is our older brother, the Son of the Father, completely oriented to the Father, who reveals the Father s name. A Church of orphans: today s gnosticism, inasmuch as it is a dechristianization, lacking Christ, leads to a Church, or better, to Christians, becoming a people of orphans. We have to make our people see this. What would I advise? I would say but I believe it is in the Gospel, where there is precisely the Lord s own teaching closeness. Today we, the Lord s servants bishops, priests, consecrated persons and committed lay people need to be close to God s people. Without closeness, there are only disembodied words. Let us think I like to reflect on this of the two pillars of the Gospel. What are the two pillars of the Gospel? The Beatitudes and Matthew 25, the criteria on which all of us will be judged. Concreteness, closeness, touching, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. But you are saying all this because it is fashionable to speak about mercy this year! No! This is the Gospel! The Gospel, the works of mercy. It shows us the Samaritan heretic who is moved, does what he has to do, and even risks his money! To touch. Then there is Jesus, who was always with people, with the disciples, or alone with the Father in prayer. Closeness. Touching. This is Jesus life And when he was moved, at the gates of the city of Nain (cf. Lk 7:11-17), he went over to touch the bier saying: Do not weep Closeness. It is closeness to touch the suffering flesh of Christ. The Church, the glory of the Church, is of course the martyrs, but also all those men and women who left everything to spend their lives in hospitals and schools, with children and with the sick I remember in Central Africa, an elderly Sister with a little girl came to greet me. I m not from here, but from the other part of the river, from Congo, but once a week I come here to shop because it is cheaper. She told me that she was 83 or 84 years old. I ve been here for 23 years, I m an obstetric nurse and I have delivered two or three thousand babies And you come here alone? Yes, we take the cano e At 83 years of age! With the canoe, it took her about an hour to get there. This woman and many others like her left home (she was an Italian, from Brescia) to touch the flesh of Christ. If we go to the mission countries in the Amazon region and Latin America, in the cemeteries we see the tombs of so many men and women religious who died young because they lacked antibodies for the diseases in those countries, and died young. The works of mercy: to touch, to teach, to console, to waste time. To waste time. I was very pleased once: a man who went to confession was in a situation where he couldn t receive absolution. He had gone with a certain apprehension, because he had been sent away several times before: No, no, go away. The priest listened to him, explained the situation, and told him: But you keep praying. God loves you. I will give you my blessing. Do you promise to come back? This priest wasted time in order to draw that man towards the sacraments. That is what closeness means. Since I am talking to bishops about closeness, I think I have to talk about the most important kind of closeness: your closeness to your priests. A bishop must be available to his priests. When I was in Argentina and I would give the Exercises (I love to give the Exercises), I would say to priests: Go talk to your bishop about this! But no, I called him but his secretary tells me that he is very busy right now, but he can receive you three months from now. Priests treated like this feel orphaned, without a father, without closeness, and they begin to lose heart. When a bishop sees that a priest has called him, he should call him right back, either that evening or the next day. Sure, I am busy, but is this important? Let s see if we can work something out. The priest can then sense that he has a father. If we don t show our fatherhood to our priests, how can we ask them to be fathers to others? Thus the sense of God s fatherhood begins to fade. The work of the Son is to touch human weakness: spiritual and corporal. Closeness. The work of the Father: to be a father, a bishop and a father. Then too, young people. Because we have to talk about young people during these days. The young are a b other! Because they always come and say the same things: Here is what I think or, the Church should do this or that. We need to be patient with young people. I knew a few priests when I was young. Those were the days when people went to confession more frequently than now. Those priests spent hours listening to the young, or received them in the parish office to hear the same things over and over, but they did so patiently. And then, to take young people out into the country, to the mountains Think of St John Paul II. What did he do with the university students? Yes, he gave them classes, but he also went with them to the mountains! Closeness. He listened to young people, he spent time with them There is one last thing I would emphasize, because I believe that the Lord asks it of me: grandparents, the elderly. You suffered under

7 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 7 communism, atheism. You know that it was the elderly who preserved and passed on the faith. The elderly possess the memory of a people; they preserve the memory of the faith, the memory of the Church. D on t waste the elderly! In this throwaway culture, dechristianized as it is, we discard whatever is not useful or helpful. No! The elderly are the memory of a people; they are the memory of the faith. To connect young people with the elderly: this too is closeness. To be close and to build closeness. That is how I would respond to the question. There are no easy answers, but we have to get our hands dirty. If we wait for the doorbell to ring, or for people to knock on the do or No, we have to go out and seek, like the shepherd who goes out to seek the lost sheep. Anyway, that s what I think SŁAW O J LESZEK GŁÓŹ, Archbishop of Danzig: Dear Pope Francis, before all else we are most grateful that you have deepened the teaching of mercy inaugurated by St John Paul II right here in Krakow. We all know that we are living in a world dominated by injustice: the rich become richer, and the poor become poorer. There is terrorism, and godless liberal ethics and morality My question is this: How do we apply the teaching of mercy, and above all, to whom? The Pope has been promoting a medicine called m i s e r i c o rd i n a, which I have brought along with me: thanks for promoting this POPE FRANCIS: now there is m i s e r i c o rd i n a plus : even stronger! SŁAW O J LESZEK GŁÓŹ: yes, and thank you for this plus. We too have a plus p ro - gramme promoted by the Government for large families. Plus is fashionable. To whom, and how above all? In the first place, to whom should our teaching on mercy be addressed? Thanks. POPE FRANCIS: Thank you. This idea of mercy is not something I came up with. It is a process. We can see that Blessed Paul VI had spoken about mercy. Then St John Paul II was the giant of mercy, with his encyclical Dives in M i s e r i c o rd i a, the canonization of St Faustina and then the Octave of Easter: he died on the eve of that day. It is a process going on for years in the Church. It is clear that the Lord asked for a renewal in the Church of this attitude of mercy among the faithful. He is the Merciful One who forgives everything. I have always been struck by a medieval capital in the Basilica of St Mary Magdalene in Vézelay, France, where the Camino of St James of Santiago begins. On that capital, one side shows Judas hanged, his eyes open, his tongue sticking out, while the other side shows the Good Shepherd who carries him. If we look carefully at the face of the Good Shepherd, the lips on one side are sad but on the other they are smiling. Mercy is a mystery. It is a mystery. It is the mystery of God. I did an interview that later became a book called The Name of God is Me rc y, but that is a journalistic expression. I think it can be said that God is the Father of mercy. At least Jesus, in the Gospel, makes us see him that way. God punishes in order to convert. And then there are the parables of mercy, and the way he chose to save us. In the fullness of time, he sent his Son to be born of a woman: in the flesh he saves us, in the flesh. Not on the basis of fear, but in the flesh. In this process which has taken place in the Church we receive so many graces. You see this world reeling from injustice, lack of love, and corruption. True enough. Today, on the airplane, speaking of that priest in his 80s who was killed in France for some time I have been saying that the world is at war, that we are in a third world war fought piecemeal. We think of Nigeria Ideologies, yes. But what is the central ideology of today, the one that is the mother of corruption and war? It is the idolatry of money. Men and women are no longer at the apex of creation, replaced by the idol of money, and everything is bought and sold for money. Money at the centre. People exploited. And the way people are being treated today? The same as ever: with cruelty! I was speaking about this with a government leader, and he told me: There is always been cruelty. The problem is that today we watch it on television; it has become part of our lives. Cruelty. Killing for money. Exploiting people, exploiting creation. A newly-elected government leader from Africa came to see me and told me: My first official act was to re-forest the country, which had been deforested and destroyed. We don t care for creation! And this means more poor people, more corruption. What are we thinking, when 80% more or less, look up statistics and if it s not 80%, it is 82 or 78% of the world s wealth is in the hands of less than 20% of its people. Please, Father, don t talk that way, you are talking like a communist! Far from it, these are the statistics! And who is paying for it? People are paying, the people of God: exploited girls, young people without employment. In Italy, 40% of young people under 25 are unemployed; it is 50% in Spain and in Croatia 47%... And why? Because of a liquid economy that encourages corruption. A good Catholic told me of his scandal when he went to see a business friend of his: I ll show you how I can earn $20,000 without leaving home. And with the computer, from California, he bought something or other and then sold it in China. In 20 minutes, or even less, he had earned $20,000. Everything is liquid! Young people do not have a culture of work because they have no jobs. The earth is dying, because it has been exploited without wisdom. And so we go on. The world is warming, why? Because we have to make money. Profit. We have succumbed to the idolatry of money : so an ambassador told me when he came to present his credentials. It is a form of idola t r y. Divine mercy is the witness, the witness of so many people, so many men and women, lay people, young people: in Italy, for example, cooperatives. Sure, there are always a few people too clever for their own good, but so many good things get done. Then there are the institutions to care for the sick: solid organizations. That is another way to do things, to foster human dignity. But what you are saying is true. We are suffering from religious illiteracy to the point that, in some shrines around the world, things get confused: people go there to pray. There are shops that sell objects of devotion like rosaries. But there are others that sell objects of superstition because people seek salvation in superstition. Religious illiteracy and a relativism that confuses one thing with another. And that is where catechesis is needed, lifelong catechesis, a catechesis that not only imparts ideas but accompanies people on their journey. Accompaniment is one of the most important attitudes, being ready to accompany people s growth in faith. This takes a lot of effort, but young people are looking for this! Young people are waiting If I start to talk, they ll be bored! But give them some work to do. Tell them to go, during their holidays, for two weeks, to help build modest homes for the poor or to do something else. They begin to feel that they are useful. And there let Go d s seed fall. Slowly. With words alone, nothing happens! Today s religious illiteracy has to be countered with three languages, with three tongues: the language of the mind, the language of the heart and the language of the hands. All three together, harmoniously. Anyway I am talking too much! These are ideas I m offering. You, in your good judgment, will know what to do. But we must always be a Church that goes forth. Once I dared to talk about that verse in the Book of Revelation: I am standing at the door, knocking (3:20). God is knocking at our door. I asked how many times the Lord knocks on our door from within, asking us to open it and let him go out with us, bringing the Gospel. Not staying inside, but going out. Going out! Thank you. LESZEK LESZKIEWICZ, Auxiliary Bishop of Tarnow: Holy Father, our pastoral work is based largely on the traditional model of the parish community, centred on the sacramental life. It is a model that is still effective. Nonetheless, we are aware that, in our situation too, the circumstances of daily life are changing rapidly and challenge the Church to come up with new pastoral models. Pastors and faithful are a bit like those disciples who are attentive and active, but do not always know how best to exploit the missionary dynamism, interior and exterior, of the ecclesial communities. Holy Father, in Evangelii Gaudium you speak of missionary disciples who enthusiastically bring the Good News to today s world. What do you suggest to us? Is there a specific way you can encourage us to build up the Church community in our world fruitfully, joyfully and with a missionary spirit? POPE FRANCIS: Thank you! I would like to stress one thing: the parish remains valid! The parish must remain. It is a structure that we must not discard; it is the home of God s People. The problem is how the parish is organized! There are parishes with ungodly parish secretaries who scare people off. Parishes with closed doors. But there also parishes with open doors, parishes where when someone comes to ask a question, they are told: Come in, make yourself at home, what can we do for you? And someone listens to them patiently, because caring for the people of God requires patience; it takes effort! A fine university professor, a Jesuit whom I knew in Buenos Aires, asked the provincial when he retired to be assigned as a parish priest in a city neighbourhood, in order to have that experience. Once a week he would come back to the university he was a member of that community and one day he told me: Tell your professor of ecclesiology that there are two things missing in his course. What? First, the holy people of CONTINUED ON PA G E 8

8 page 8 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number With Polish Bishops in Krakow CONTINUED FROM PA G E 7 the imprisoned, the sick, the elderly? What about the children? Do you have a place for them to play? What about the oratory? The oratory is one of the great parish institutions, at least in Italy. There kids play and learn a little catechesis. They come home tired, happy, and a good seed has been sown. So the parish is important! There are those who say that the parish is no longer relevant because this is the hour of the movements. That is not true! The movements help, but the movements must not be an alternative to the parish. They must help in the parish, contribute to the parish, like confraternities, Catholic Action and so many other groups. To want to innovate and change the parish structure? What I am saying may seem heretical, but it is how I see things. I believe the parish structure is analogous to the episcopal structure, different but analogous. The parish cannot be touched; it has to remain as a place of creativity, a reference point, a mother, all these things. It is where that inventiveness has to find expression. When a parish does all this, it becomes with regard to missionary disciples what I call a parish that goes forth. For example, I think about one parish a good example that was later imitated by many in a town where children tended not to be baptized because people didn t have a lot of money. But they would God essentially wear you out. And second, the holy people of God naturally do whatever they think best. And this wears you out! Today being a parish priest is exhausting: managing a parish takes effort nowadays, with so many problems. The Lord has asked us to get a little tired, to work and not to rest. A parish is exhausting if it is well organized. The renewal of the parish has to be a constant concern of bishops. How is this parish doing? What is it doing? What is its religious education programme like? How well is catechesis being presented? Is the church open? So many things I think of one parish in Buenos Aires. Whenever an engaged couple arrived to get married, the secretary would immediately begin by saying: Here are the prices. This is wrong, parishes like this are wrong. How do we greet people? How attentive are we to them? Is someone always in the con- fessional? In parishes not those in the country but in city parishes and those on the highways if there is a confessional with the light on, people always come. Always! A welcoming parish. These are the questions we bishops should be asking our priests. How is your parish doing. Do you go out? Do you visit prepare for the patronal feast three or four months beforehand by visiting homes and seeing how many children were not baptized. They would then prepare the families and as part of the patronal feast they would baptize 30 or 40 children who otherwise would not have been baptized. Coming up with things of this kind... People don t get married in Church. I think of a priests meeting where someone got up and said: Have you considered why? And he gave all those reasons we know about: the present culture, etc. But there are lots of people who do not get married because it is expensive! It costs money. Everything costs money the party it is a big social event. And that priest, who was quite creative, said: If anyone wants to get married, I will wait for you. Resurrection of the widow s son in Nain (Stained glass in the Cathedral of La Mans, France) Because in Argentina, we have two weddings: first you get married civilly and then you go to your place of worship and get married. Some many! do not come [to the Church] to get married because they don t have the money for a big party But the priests who are smart say: D on t worry, I ll wait for you! On the days that the civil marriage office is open from 11 to 12 and from 1-2 I won t take my siesta! So after the civil marriage the couples come to the Church, get married and leave in peace. To be creative, to try to go out and meet people, to put yourself in p eople s shoes. Nowadays parishes that are offices don t work, because people are not disciplined. Your people are disciplined, and this is a grace of God. But people in general are not disciplined I think of my own country: if you don t go out to find them, if you don t approach them, they do not come. This is what it means to be a missionary disciple, a parish that goes forth. To go out and look for people, as God did, when he sent his Son to find us. I don t know if this is a simplistic answer, but I don t have any other. I m not a brilliant pastoral theologian, I just say whatever comes to mind. KRZYSZTOF ZA D A R KO, Auxiliary Bishop of Koszalin-Kołobrzeg: Holy Father, one of the most troubling problems facing Europe today is the question of refugees. How can we help them, since they are so numerous? And what can we do to counter fears of an invasion or aggression on their part, which would paralyze society as a whole? POPE FRANCIS: Thank you! The problem of re f u g e e s It wasn t always like this. Let s speak of migrants and refugees, considering the two together. My father was a migrant. I told the President [of Poland] that in the factory where my father worked, there were many Polish immigrants, in the period after the war. I was a child and I knew many of them. My country is a country of immigrants, everybody And there were no problems. Other times, really Why is there so much migration today? I am not talking about emigration from one s own country to another. This is due to lack of work; it is clear that people leave to seek employment abroad. This is a domestic problem, which you yourselves have to some extent Here I am speaking of those who come to us, fleeing from wars, from hunger. The problem is back there. Why is the problem there? Because in those countries people are exploited, the earth is being exploited, there is exploitation for the sake of making more money. In talking with world economists who see this problem, they say: We need to invest in these countries. Investments will lead to employment and then there will be no need to emigrate. But there is war! There is tribal warfare, ideological wars or other artificial wars created by arms traffickers who make a living from this. They give weapons to you, who are against them, and to them, who are against you. That is how they make a living! Corruption is really at the origin of migration. What can be done? I believe that every country has to look at times and means. Not all countries are alike; not all countries have the same possibilities. But they do have the possibility of being generous! Generous as Christians. We cannot invest there, but for those who come here How many and how? There is no one answer that fits every case. For acceptance depends on the situation of each country and culture. But certainly many things can be done. For example, weekly prayer to the Blessed Sacrament, prayer for those who knock at Europe s door and are unable to enter. Some do, but others don t Then one does enter and takes a path that generates fear. We have countries that for years have done a good job of integrating migrants. They have integrated them well. In others, unfortunately, certain ghettos have formed. A whole reform has to take place, on a worldwide level, with regard to this commitment and acceptance. But that is something relative: what is absolute is a welcoming heart. That is absolute! With prayer and intercession, by doing what I can. What is relative is the way I am able to do it. Not everyone can do it the same way. The problem is worldwide! The exploitation of creation, and the exploitation of persons. We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God. I would like to conclude with this aspect, since behind all this there are ideologies. In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these I will call it clearly by its name is [the ideology of] gender. Today children children! are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this is terrible! In a conversation with Pope Benedict, who is in good health and very perceptive, he said to me: Holiness, this is the age of sin against God the Creator. He is very perceptive. God created man and woman; God created the world in a certain way and we are doing the exact opposite. God gave us things in a raw state, so that we could shape a culture; and then with this culture, we are shaping things that bring us back to the raw state! Pope Benedict s observation should make us think. This is the age of sin against God the Creator. That will help us. But, Christopher, you will say to me: What does this have to do with migrants? It has to do with the overall situation, no? As for migrants, I would say: the problem is there in their native lands But how do we welcome them? Everyone has to determine how. But all of us can have an open heart and think of spending an hour in the parishes, an hour a week of adoration and prayer for migrants. Prayer moves mountains! These are the four questions. Anyway... Pardon me if I ve talked too much, but my Italian blood betrays me Thank you very much for your welcome, and let us hope these days will fill us with great joy. Let us now pray to Our Lady, who is our Mother and who always takes us by the hand. Salve Regina And don t forget the elderly, who are the memory of a people.

9 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 9 A good preacher must be a contemplative of the Word and of the people, the Pope said. On Thursday morning, 4 August, he received in audience participants in the General Chapter of the Dominicans in the Clementine Hall. The following is a translation of the address which he delivered in Spanish. Dear Brothers and Sisters, Today, we could describe this day as A Jesuit among Friars : the morning with you and the evening in Assisi with the Franciscans: among Friars. I welcome you and I thank Fr Bruno Cadoré, Master of the Order, for the welcome that he addressed to me on his own behalf and that of all those present, while the General Chapter taking place in Bologna, is concluding, during which you have desired to revive your roots at the tomb of your holy Founder. This year has a special meaning for your religious family as eight centuries have passed since Pope Honorius III approved the Order of Preachers. On the occasion of this Jubilee anniversary that you are celebrating, I join you in giving thanks for the abundant gifts you have received over the course of this time. I also wish to express my gratitude to the Order for the significant contribution it has made to the Church and for its collaboration with the Apostolic See, which, since the very beginning, it has maintained with a spirit of loyal service up to now. This eighth centenary leads us to commemorate the men and women of faith, scholars, contemplatives, A Jesuit among Friars The Pontiff asks Dominicans to be contemplative of the Word and of the people A good preacher missionaries, martyrs and apostles of charity, who brought the kind gesture and the tenderness of God everywhere, enriching the Church and demonstrated new ways to incarnate the Gospel through p re a c h - ing, witness and charity: the three pillars that guarantee the future of the Order and maintain the freshness of the founding charism. God moved St Dominic to found an Order of Preachers, which has the mission of preaching that Jesus entrusted to the Apostles. It is the Word of God that burns within you and impels you to go forth to proclaim Jesus Christ to all peoples (cf. Mt 28:19-20). The Founding Father said: First contemplate, then teach. Evangelized by God, in order to evangelize. Without a strong union with Him, preaching might seem completely perfect, quite reasonable and even admirable, but it will not touch the heart, which is what has to change. The serious and assiduous study of theological matters is also essential, because it allows you to grow closer to reality and to listen to God s people. The preacher contemplates the Word and also contemplates the people, who are waiting to be understood (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 154). Effectively transmitting the Word of God requires testimony: faithful teachers of the truth and courageous witnesses of the Gospel. Witnesses embody the teaching, they make it tangible, attractive, and leave no one indifferent; they unite the joy of the Gospel to the truth, the joy of knowing we are loved by God and are objects of his infinite mercy (cf. ibid., 142). St Dominic told his followers: Walking barefoot, let us go to p re a c h. He reminds us of the passage of the burning bush, when God said to Moses: Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy g ro u n d (Ex 3:5). A good preacher is aware that he is moving on holy ground, because the Word he brings is holy, as are the people who are to receive it. The faithful not only need to receive the Word in its integrity, but they also need to experience the life witness of the preacher (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 171). The Saints This day would be spent as a Jesuit among the Friars, Pope Francis said, as he began a very full schedule on Thursday, 4 August. At the Vatican in the morning, he received Friars gathered for the General Chapter of Dominicans and in the afternoon he went to Assisi to pray with Franciscans at the Portiuncula. This year both religious families are celebrating the eighth centenary of two moments that were fundamental to their origins: the approval by Honorius III of the Order of St Dominic and the decision by the same Pontiff to concede the indulgence of the Portiuncula, also known as the Pardon of Assisi. During the audience with the Dominican Friars held in the Clementine Hall, the Pontiff was greeted by Bruno Cadoré, Master of the Order, on behalf of the chapters gathered in Bologna at the Sepulchre of their Founder. That afternoon after arriving at the Basilica of St Mary of the Angels in Assisi, the Pope first prayed quietly in the Portiuncula, before giving a a catechesis on a passage of the Gospel. He then performed a gesture of tenderness: a visit to the infirm Friars of Assisi. Benozzo Gozzoli, The meeting of St Dominic and St Francis (1452) brought forth abundant fruit because, by their life and their mission, they spoke with the language of the heart, which knows no barriers and can be understood by everyone. Lastly, those who preach and bear witness must do so in c h a r i t y. Without this, they will be suspect and disputable. St Dominic had a dilemma at the beginning of his life, which marked the whole of his existence: How can I study on dead skins while the flesh of Christ suffers?. The body of Christ, alive and suffering, cries out to the preacher and does not leave him in peace. The cry of the poor and the excluded awakens us and helps us to understand the compassion Jesus felt for the people (Mt 15:32). Looking around us, we find that the men and women of today are thirsting for God. They are the living flesh of Christ which cries out: I thirst for an authentic and liberating word, for a fraternal and kind gesture. This cry beckons us and must constitute the backbone of the mission and give life to structures and pastoral programmes. Think about this when you reflect on the need to adjust the structure of the Order, so as to discern the answer you must give to this cry from God. The more we go to satiate the thirst of our neighbour, the more we will be preachers of truth, of that truth proclaimed with love and mercy, which St Catherine of Siena speaks of (cf. The Book of Divine Doctrine, 35). In the encounter with the living flesh of Christ we are evangelized and we rediscover the passion of being preachers and witnesses of his love; we free ourselves from the dangerous temptation of Gnosticism, which is so prevalent today. Dear brothers and sisters, with a heart full of gratitude for the goods the Lord has given for your Order and for the Church, I encourage you to joyfully follow the charism inspired by St Dominic, which has been lived in various ways by many saints of the Dominican family. His example inspires us to face the future with hope, knowing that God always renews everything... and takes nothing away. May Our Mother, the Virgin of the Rosary, intercede for you and protect you, that you may be preachers and courageous witnesses of God s love. Thank you!

10 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 10/11 The following is the English text of the meditation which the Holy Father offered in Italian in the Papal Basilica of St Mary of the Angels in Assisi on Thursday evening, 4 August. Today, dear brothers and sisters, I would like before all else to recall the words that, according to an ancient tradition, St Francis spoke in this very place, in the presence of all the townsfolk and bishops: I want to send you all to heaven!. What finer thing could the Poor Man of Assisi ask for, if not the gift of salvation, eternal life and unending joy, that Jesus won for us by his death and resurrection? Besides, what is heaven if not the mystery of love that eternally unites us to God, to contemplate him forever? The Church has always professed this by expressing her belief in the communion of saints. We are never alone in living the faith; we do so in the company of all the saints and holy ones, including our loved ones who practised the faith with joyful simplicity and bore witness to it by their lives. There is a bond, unseen but not for that reason any less real, which makes us, by baptism, one body moved by one Spirit (cf. Eph 4:4). When St Francis asked Pope Honorius III to grant an indulgence to all who visited the Portiuncula, he was perhaps thinking of Jesus words to the disciples: In my Fa t h e r s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also (Jn 14:2-3). Forgiveness pardon is surely our direct route to that place in heaven. How hard it is to pardon! How much effort it takes for us to forgive others! Let us think about this. Here at the Portiuncula everything speaks to us of pardon! What a great gift the Lord has given us in teaching us to forgive or at least to try to forgive and in this way to touch the Father s mercy! We have heard the parable in which Jesus teaches us to forgive (cf. Mt 18:21-35). Why should we forgive someone who has offended us? Because we were forgiven first, and of infinitely more. There is no one here who has not been At the Portiuncula the Pope indicates the path of renewal for the Church and so ciety The world needs forgiveness To offer mercy to those who are caught up in resentment and harbour hatred forgiven. Let each of us reflect on this... Let us reflect in silence on the wrong we have done and how the Lord has forgiven us. The parable tells us exactly this: just as God has forgiven us, so we too should forgive those who do us harm. This is the caress of forgiveness. A forgiving heart caresses. It is far removed from the attitude of: Yo u ll pay for this!. Forgiveness is something other. So it is with the prayer that Jesus taught us, the Our Father, in which we say: Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors (Mt 6:12). The debts are our sins in the sight of God, and our debtors are those whom we, for our part, must forgive. Each of us might be that servant in the parable burdened with so great a debt that he could never repay it. When we kneel before the priest in the confessional, we do exactly what that servant did. We say, Lord, have patience with me. Have you ever reflected on God s patience? He is full of patience. We are well aware of our many faults and the fact that we often fall back into the same sins. Yet God never tires of offering us his forgiveness each time we ask for it. His is a pardon that is full and complete, one that assures us that, even if we fall back into the same sins, he is merciful and never ceases to love us. Like the master in the parable, God feels compassion, a mixture of pity and love; that is how the Gospel describes God s mercy towards us. Our Father is moved to compassion whenever we repent, and he sends us home with hearts calm and at peace. He tells us that all is remitted and forgiven. God s forgiveness knows no limits; it is greater than anything we can imagine and it comes to all who know in their hearts that they have done wrong and desire to return to him. God looks at the heart that seeks f o rg i v e n e s s. The problem, unfortunately, comes whenever we have to deal with a brother or sister who has even slightly offended us. The reaction described in the parable describes it perfectly: He seized him by the throat and said, Pa y what you owe! (Mt 18:28). Here we encounter all the drama of our human relationships. When we are indebted to others, we expect mercy; but when others are indebted to us, we demand justice! All of us do this. It is not a reaction worthy of Christ s disciples, nor is it the sign of a Christian style of life. Jesus teaches us to forgive and to do so limitlessly: I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven (v. 22). What he offers us is the Father s love, not our own claims to justice. To trust in the latter alone would not be the sign that we are Christ s disciples, who have obtained mercy at the foot of the cross solely by virtue of the love of the Son of God. Let us not forget, then, the harsh saying at the end of the parable: So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart (v. 35). Dear brothers and sisters, the pardon of which St Francis made himself a channel here at the Portiuncula continues to bring forth heaven even after eight centuries. In this Holy Year of Mercy, it becomes ever clearer that the path of forgiveness can truly renew the Church and the world. To offer to day s world the witness of mercy is a task from which none of us can feel exempted. I repeat: to offer today s world the witness of mercy is a task from which none of us can feel exempted. The world needs forgiveness; too many people are caught up in resentment and harbour hatred, because they are incapable of forgiving. They ruin their own lives and the lives of those around them rather than finding the joy of serenity and peace. Let us ask St Francis to intercede for us, so that we may always be humble signs of forgiveness and channels of mercy. We can pray about this. Each in his or her own way. I ask the friars and the bishops to go to the confessionals I too will go to be available for pardon. It will do us good to receive it today, here, all together. May the Lord grant us the grace to say those words that the Father does not let us finish, the words spoken by the prodigal son: Father, I have sinned against.... He did not let him finish, but embraced him. We start to speak but he does not let us finish, and gives us a new garment... But, Father, I am afraid of going back and doing the same thing tom o r ro w. Return! The Father is always on the lookout, waiting for the return of the prodigal son. All of us are that son. May the Lord grant us this grace. The following is a translation of the Pope s words of farewell. I thank you very much for your welcome, and I ask that the Lord bless you. I thank you for this willingness to be close. Also, do not forget: always forgive. Always! Forgive from your heart and, if you can, draw near to the other, forgive. Because if we forgive, the Lord forgives us; and we all are in need of forgiveness... Does anyone here not need forgiveness?... Raise your hand!... We all need it. Now let us pray together to our Lady and then I will give you the b l e s s i n g. Hail Mary... [Blessing] And please pray for me! Ar r i v e d e rc i! JOSÉ RODRÍGUEZ CA R B A L L O, OFM* At the Portiuncula on the 800th anniversary of the Assisi Pardon Yearning for Paradise This year marks the 800th anniversary of the Feast of the Portiuncula Indulgence. The Portiuncula is a small plot of land where, during Saint Francis time, stood a small, dilapidated chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary which belonged to the Benedictines of Mount Subasio in the vicinity of Assisi. From the Franciscan sources we know that Francis loved this place more than any other in the world, as St Bonaventure tells us in his biography of Francis, because here he began his mission in humility, he progressed in virtue, and ended his life happily. Francis, the P o v e re l l o, gathered his first 12 followers at the Portiuncula. It was there that, a few years earlier, the Mother of Mercy had created the Order of Friars Minor and the Order of the Poor Sisters. In 1211, the young Clare left her house, city, and family to take refuge in the Portiuncula and consecrate herself to the Lord, embracing the form of life Francis had outlined with the blessing of Pope Innocent I V. According to the sources, Francis himself was the first to receive the Portiuncula Indulgence from Pope Honorius III when the latter was in Perugia in Also referred to as the Assisi p a rd o n, it is celebrated annually in Franciscan churches all over the world on 2 August, but especially in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (St Mary of the Angels), the loving patroness of the Franciscan pearl, a holy place among the saints, as inscribed on the entrance to the small chapel. The Portiuncula Indulgence was born out of Francis concern for the poor, since, unlike other indulgences, it cost absolutely nothing. It was also an indulgence obtained though the intercession of the Mother of Mercy, the Virgin as a typos of the C h u rc h, as Francis says: Our Lady of the Angels, to whom the P o v e re l l o had a special devotion. Why was Francis so intent on asking for this indulgence that would change the penitential practice of the Church? The Assisi pardon gives us a glimpse into the depth of the spirit of Francis who, as Bonaventure writes, desired with a deep, sympathetic piety and the salvation of every soul, feeling an ardent desire to bring that about. Francis culled from the heart of Christ the promise of a complete and immense pardon that excludes no one who, due to poverty, was unable to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land or to Santiago de Compostela. The Portiuncula Indulgence reveals clearly the great concern Francis had for the poor. The Portiuncula Indulgence was an indulgence precisely for the poor. When Honorius III asked Francis how many years he wished the extraordinary indulgence to extend, Francis boldly responded that he was not asking for years, but for souls. Francis wanted this river of mercy gushing from the pierced heart of the Redeemer and available to all thanks to the intercession of the Queen of the Angels to flow steadily and to provide refuge to all of those who crossed the threshold of this holy place where Francis reawakened our yearning for paradise. The providential coincidence of the anniversary of the Portiuncula Indulgence with the Jubilee of Mercy promulgated by Pope Francis gave good reason for the Pope himself to visit the Basilica of the Queen of the Angels on 4 August. It is a coincidence that gives us an opportunity to discover in St Francis one of the greatest prophets and apostles of mercy. But in what sense? For Francis, everything began, including his prophetic mission to be an apostle of mercy, with his choice to follow the Gospel. After he had heard it at the Portiuncula, he explained, This is what I want, this is what I ve been searching for, this is what I am sighing for and yearning to put into practice from the depths of my heart. From that time, burning with a desire to live the Gospel with radical seriousness, sine glossa, he takes it as his guide and assumes it as the rule of life for himself and for his followers, insofar as it allows him faithfully to follow in the footsteps of Christ, poor and crucified, to the point that he could identify himself with the Lord. By b ecoming Jesus, the face of the Father s mercy, as Pope Francis reminds us, which leads to a Christiform life, as in the case of Francis of Assisi, he can do no less than be transformed into a prophet and apostle of mercy. This is the root, the beginning and end of the Poverello of Assisi s mission as a witness of mercy. Moreover, this mission is a consequence of feeling himself a recipient of the L o rd s mercy, the first step to becoming a convincing and credible witness of mercy. Whoever is conscious of his own sin in his Te s t a m e n t, Francis makes reference to the time before his conversion when he lived in sin and feels pardoned by pure mercy, cannot but help to show mercy toward everyone. And this is what Francis experienced and did when, after feeling himself to be the recipient of the Lord s mercy, by using m e rc y with the leper, he embraced and kissed him. The kiss given to the leper was nothing other than the consequence of feeling kissed, loved, and forgiven thanks to the Father s mercy. How can we not see in this embrace of a leper a gesture that imitates the gesture Pope Francis asks of us all in Misericordiae Vultus: Let us open our eyes and see the misery of the world, the wounds of our brothers and sisters who are denied their dignity, and let us recognize that we are compelled to heed their cry for help! May we reach out to them and support them so they can feel the warmth of our presence, our friendship, and our fraternity! (n. 15). Francis is well aware of the two-sided reality in which he lives: the reality of sin on the one hand and the reality of the Lord s grace and mercy on the other. When Brother Maseo, one of his first companions, surprised by the great number of Fr a n c i s followers, asked him three times: Why are they following you?, the P o v e re l l o, gazing at the sky, responded: Because no sinner is more vile, more miserable, and greater than me. Francis deeply felt his own sinfulness, but this reality did not defeat him; rather, it brought him to confess that he and all of us are saved and redeemed by His mercy alone. It is the mercy of the Father of mercies, as Sr Clare love to call God in her own Te s t a - ment. Francis also experienced God s mercy in his almsgiving. If there was not enough work to support the brothers, especially the sick, the Poverello did not hesitate to recommend that the brothers go out with faith to beg alms at the Lord s table, because the Father cannot help but show mercy to his children that have faith in him. Sergio Albano, Kissing the leper (2003) This experience of mercy, which the community experienced personally on many occasions, led Francis and his brothers to practice, from their poverty, the mercy of almsgiving with all the needy, particularly those who asked for it through the love of God. God used the mercy of almsgiving with Francis and his brothers: neither he nor his brothers could deny others this very mercy. This profound conviction led them to sell a book of the Gospels (a veritable treasure at that time) in order to help the mother of a friar who was in need. Another expression of mercy implemented by Francis was acceptance and hospitality and everything it entailed in his day. As God did not close the door on Francis, and indeed as God closes the door on no one, since He never tires of forgiving (as Pope Francis has repeatedly said), then how can He refuse anyone who knocks? No matter what the condition of someone who seeks hospitality, whether he be friend or foe, thief or bandit, he must be warmly welcomed. Here we can see a prime example of what Pope Francis asks for in this Jubilee of Mercy: we look forward to the experience of opening our hearts to those living on the outermost fringes of so ciety. With this in mind, we cannot help but think of the works of mercy. When we perform them, mercy does CONTINUED ON PA G E 13

11 page 12 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number RODRIGO GUERRA LÓPEZ* An important debate took place in Krakow on 16 and 17 December Archbishop Karol Wojtyła had just finished a dense book that, among other things, sought to explain the underlying anthropology of Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The book was entitled The Acting Person (1969), and a large gathering of philosophers had been convened to discuss the intense speculative force of this book. It is interesting to review the interventions published subsequent to the conference in a collection edited by Andrzej Szostek. On the one hand, there was considerable support for the book. Those, in fact, who had studied phenomenology and personalism understood that Wo j t y ła was going in a new direction by claiming that the objective recognition of subjectivity does not necessarily imply subjectivism. Rather, human action is a privileged moment for apprehending the truth of the human person. This intuition allowed the Polish archbishop to advance a hypothesis about how to overcome the one-sidedness of the Marxist theory about the primacy of revolutionary praxis by means of a renewed anthropology of action and communion. On the other hand, however, there were those who were hesitant or overtly distrustful of Wojtyła s reflections. Some of these philosophers were of a certain The relevance of certain reflections by Karol Wojtyła for understanding Amoris Laetitia Creative fidelity Thomistic bent unaccustomed to returning to things in themselves. Some had fallen into the habit of merely repeating an accepted canon of orthodox philosophy. Rather than affirming truth as the adaequatio of the mind to reality, they seemed implicitly to maintain that truth is the adaequatio of the mind to St Thomas Aquinas. They found everything Wojtyła was up to unsatisfactory: the method, the terminology, and the proposals. I wish to recall this episode to show that resistance is not infrequent when Christian thought takes a new step forward. This resistance generally arises from a suspicion of infidelity to an inherited patrimony of thought; the use of a new lexicon considered ambiguous and the many risks involved by apparently going off in a different direction based on some new point of view. Rather than using Karol Wojtyła s The Acting Person, we might turn to other examples. Above all, we can recall the controversy surrounding the notion of religious liberty, where the apparent opposition between the encyclical Libertas of Leo XIII and the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II led some to label the entire Council heretical. Or we can consider the introduction of the unitive and procreative meaning of the sexual act in Humanae Vitae that prevailed over the Thomistic theory of primary and secondary ends. Similarly, there was novelty in recognizing that the human being is created in the image and likeness of God based on the re- lational uni-duality of man and woman as elaborated by John Paul II, who completed and expanded the traditional understanding of the image and likeness of God as based on higher human faculties such as intelligence, free will, and so on. The list of examples would run the gamut of Christian doctrine. Natural reality and the deposit of faith undoubtedly have a definitive and objective structure. However, the comprehension of these truths allows for organic developments that explore new phenomena that need to be recognized in different historical periods. Hence an attentive reading of the signs of the times is not extraneous to the intellectual effort that needs to take place whenever we face a new philosophical, theological, or pastoral reflection. I have the impression that this partially explains what is happening when the Pontiff offers the world an Exhortation like Amoris Laetitia. Pope Francis is not changing the Church s fundamental teaching. He would not dare do so because he knows that the deposit of faith is not an arbitrary invention that can be changed according to chance discoveries. The deposit of faith is a precious gift that needs to be guarded. But guarding it does not mean placing it in a freezer and letting it hibernate to suspend its metabolism. To the contrary, it is the dynamism of a living God who enters into and takes part in our history in order to redeem it. This can be seen every day in the pastoral activity of the Church and especially in the ministry of the Successor of Peter. The Roman Pontiff would betray his vocation and his service to the People of God if he suffocated the real presence of God in history, in the very places where it is found most readily: in the Scriptures, the people, and in particular in those who suffer isolation and pain. For this reason, some of the criticisms recently directed against the Pope seem to me unjust and unfounded. Amoris Laetitia is an authentic act of the papal magisterium. It is very imprudent, besides theologically inaccurate, to suggest that this Apostolic Exhortation is a sort of personal, almost private, opinion. The Pope exercises his munus docendi in a variety of ways: in his messages, speeches, homilies and, undoubtedly, in his encyclicals and post-synodal exhortations. The latter of these is born from a broad exercise of synodality, a fact of no little importance. Furthermore, Am o r - is Laetitia neither breaks from, nor is in discontinuity with, the Gospel, the natural law, or previous papal teaching. In particular, the much discussed eighth chapter of the Exhortation is a good example of what Benedict XVI taught in a general way during his speech to the Roman Curia on 22 December Mutatis mutandis, we could say that the teaching on the nature of the sacrament of marriage, the Eucharist, and the conditions for ascertaining mortal sin have not changed in recent magisterial teaching. But this true and immutable teaching, to which obedience is owed, needs to be deepened and handed down with due consideration for the changing times we are living in. This is precisely what Amoris Laetitia does: it is an organic development born out of creative fidelity. To read it in a hermeneutic of rupture, as some critics of Pope Francis do, is, in my opinion, erroneous. Here are a few reasons why. First of all, this reading is an inconsistent interpretation of St Thomas Critics of Pope Francis lack an adequate understanding of not only St Thomas Aquinas but also John Paul II as well as Benedict XVI Aq u i n a s. The Angelic Doctor knew how to understand and to love with unparalleled passion. All of the universal categories he uses, including those of the moral order, diminish in their necessity and increase in their contingency the more they are realized in concrete realities. The misunderstanding of this point on the part of some Thomists reveals itself in several ways. Allow me to point out just one: the fairly common tendency to interpret reason as the faculty that regards the universal, overlooking important contributions Aquinas made to recognizing the ratio particularis and its role in theoretical and practical knowledge. The way to knowledge begins with the singular, passes to the universal, but returns again to the concrete. Methodologically overlooking this elementary ingredient has produced a sort of a-historicity in much contemporary Thomistic reflection and a difficulty in understanding the level at which the C h u rc h s pastoral concern is directed, as well as many comments, suggestions, and analyses offered by Pope Francis in the Exhortation. A good example of this is how some equate in a more or less univocal way the complexities of the i r re g u l a r situations in which many couples find themselves in and mortal sin, thus closing the door unequivocally to the Eucharist. To affirm, inexplicitly or explicitly, that every i r re g u l a r situation is by definition a mortal sin and devoid of sanctifying grace seems to be in grave contradiction with the Gospel, the natural law, and the authentic teaching of St Thomas Aquinas. The Exhortation published by Pope Francis does not intend to dilute or dismiss the structure of a

12 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 13 St Thomas Aquinas (1600, enamel, To u l o u s e ) p erson s ethical life by unilaterally accentuating certain moral absolutes; much less does it water down the universal dimension of norms into a purely factual, concrete, and contextual ethics. From this point of view, the Pope has written a profoundly Thomistic Exhortation that recovers in a healthy way the notions of participation and analogy that pave the way to a response, aside from theories, to the drama of the real person acting in real situations. Second of all, the critiques against Pope Francis also lack an accurate understanding of John Paul II. Pope Wo j t y ła, first as philosopher and then as Roman Pontiff, opened an important door in the quest to reestablish a solid basis for anthropology and ethics. A purely objectivistic view of the human person is insufficient for appreciating that which is irreducible in him. It is necessary to look carefully at fundamental human experience to find the broad and rich world of subjectivity and consciousness that lies within. Within this world, according to John Paul II, the natural law does not appear in a deductive way from a few inclinations. Rather, its normative foundation consists in practical reason understood as the capacity to recognize, step by step, the truth of the good. It is precisely in this that we find pastoral gradualness, or the patience with which we need to listen to and understand a person who has not fully understood a given moral value and its practical ramifications. The pastoral gradualness elaborated in Familiaris Consortio a c q u i re s even more substance when we consider Amoris Laetitia in its entirety. Of course, interpreting this gradualness correctly requires not only that we not confuse it with a sort of doctrinal gradualness, but also that we take on the mindset that discernment is necessary in every concrete case. Any purely formal repetition of John Paul II s teaching that fails to give space to the need to accompany the person, to help in his discernment, and to effect his eventual integration betrays the pastoral dimension of every magisterial act. Finally, the critics of Pope Francis lack an adequate understanding of Benedict XVI. A lot can be said about this, but I would simply say that it is simplistic to point to Benedict XVI as a sort of pontifical justification of rigorism. There are those who would like to paint the Pope emeritus as a CONTINUED FROM PA G E 10 not remain a mere sentiment, but is actualized in sharing, solidarity and, ultimately, in love. Mercy is a passion that turns into compassion, into a shared life. To accept and to give: this is what the P o v e re l l o teaches us in this Year of Mercy. And love is either concrete, as Jesus shows by dying on the cross for us, or it is merely an ideology not worthy of the name love. Francis of Assisi does mercy : he manifests mercy precisely be forgiving. Once he has been forgiven, he desires to exclude no one from forgiveness. This shines clearly from a letter Francis wrote to a priest whose name is unknown to us, who was suffering due to certain friars in his community who were particularly sinful. We can refer to this letter, written between 1221 and 1223, as Fr a n c i s Magna Charta of Mercy. In it, we read, that there be no brother in the world who has sinned, how great so ever his sin may be, who after he has seen thy face shall ever go away without thy mercy, if he seek mercy, and, if he seek not mercy, ask thou him if he desires mercy. And if he afterwards appears before thy face a thousand times, love him more than me, to the end that thou mayest draw him to the Lord, and on such ones always have mercy. When faced with the sin of a brother, or with the sin of anyone for that matter, the price to pay for anyone who exercises authority or anyone who has been called to exercise the ministry of reconciliation think of a priest, for example passionate defender of unchangeable truth, in contrast with the current Pope. But this is not the case. The reality is much more complex. Pope Francis is in continuity with Benedict XVI. One of the most moving examples I have found to demonstrate this is a passage in which Joseph Ratzinger clearly recognizes that even in the case of those who do not fully follow Jesus Christ it is possible to discover and cultivate the journey of the Christian life. A person continues to be a Christian, Ratzinger wrote in Fede e futuro (Faith and Future), as long as he makes the effort to give the central assent, as long as he tries to utter the fundamental Yes of trust, even if he doesn t know how to situate or resolve many particular aspects. There will be moments in life when, among the many moments of faith s darkness, we have to concentrate on the simple Yes: I believe in you, Jesus of Nazareth, I trust that in you the divine meaning has been revealed, for which I may live my life in confidence and peace, with patience and courage. If this centre is still present, the human being still has faith, even if many of the concrete particulars of the confession of faith are obscure to him and perhaps Yearning for Paradise is the joyous price of mercy. On the other hand, it is in the exercise of pardon a pardon without limits, as the Gospel asks that we find the place where we are called to live true ascesis, and to commit ourselves to live less narcissistically. What a remarkable human attitude (precisely because it was divine) Francis lived, in contrast with the logic and the attitude of the world that permits everything and procures everything for itself, except for pardon! In the same letter, Francis imparts a golden rule to confessors: let them have absolutely no power of enjoining any other penance but this: go and sin no more. Francis was a man m e rc i e d by the Lord, who went on to become a prophet and an apostle of mercy; a not practicable. This is because at its core, faith I will say it once again is not a system of knowledge, but a trust. The Christian faith means to find a You that sustains me and, notwithstanding the imperfection and intrinsically incomplete characteristic of every human encounter, gives me the promise of an indestructible love that not only aspires to eternity, but imparts it. Therefore, in my opinion, there is no discontinuity in the teaching of the most recent Pontiffs. What we are witnessing is a creative fidelity that allows us, in practical terms, to see how important it is to give primacy to time and space, as Pope Francis teaches. Only in this way is it possible to live patiently with those who are afflicted and wounded, only in this way is it possible to accompany one other without scandalizing ourselves with our weaknesses, and at the same to discover that in the Church, the presence of Jesus Christ in history, there is a journey full of tenderness for rebuilding lives, for healing all wounds, even the deepest ones. *Teacher and Researcher, Centro de Investigación Social Avanzada (Querétaro, Mexico) man who lay in the bosom of the Fa t h e r s mercy, and who knew no other way of following Jesus than to be merciful with others. Mercy transformed into compassion and love transformed into forgiveness are the basis of the great revolution we all desire and we all need. Mercy and forgiveness are attitudes that need to be instantiated into concrete necessary behaviours if we want to avoid self-destruction. The Year of Mercy asks us to be merciful just as the Father is merciful. And Francis of Assisi tells us, just as he told his brothers before he died: I have done my task; may the Lord show you yours. *Secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life

13 page 14 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number GIANLUCA BICCINI The silent prayer in Auschwitz and Birkenau, the visit to sick children in the paediatric hospital of Krakow, the Via Crucis of World Youth Day with the young people of Iraq and those who live in particular situations of hardship. According to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, there is a guiding thread that links these three moments experienced by Pope Francis on Friday, 29 July, during his journey to Poland: so much that, unquestionably, that day can truly be considered as Pope Fr a n c i s so-called Mercy Friday for the month of July. The Archbishop explained this in an interview with L Osservatore Romano, in which he also spoke of the catecheses he held with young Italians during WYD in K r a k o w. For the Dicastery responsible for vitalizing the pastoral ministry and the organization of the Jubilee events, what did the Pope s day in Poland on Friday, 29 July, represent? Looking at what Francis did, we can undoubtedly define it as one of the Mercy Fridays that he is bringing about each month of this extraordinary Holy Year. I would like to add that in this circumstance Francis experienced it in an even more meaningful way. I believe, in fact, that the silence of Auschwitz, his silent prayer, and his wish to share some time with the sick children, with Iraqi young people or the disadvantaged present at the Way of the Cross, are wholly in line with the works of mercy. Let us not forget that praying for the deceased is a spiritual work of mercy, and visiting the sick is a corporal work of mercy. Therefore I would say that, although on an organizational level we suspended Jubilee events during the summer period in order to give him a rest from the many efforts of these months, the Pope has amazed us yet again. And thus in July he fully held his Mercy Friday, in an even more surprising way, if you will. Similarly, WYD in Krakow was considered the Jubilee for young people. What role did your Dicastery play in the days in Poland? An interview with Archbishop Fisichella A special Mercy Friday We are in the Holy Year and therefore World Youth Day is included in all effects in this moment of grace that Pope Francis wanted to give to the entire Church. WYD is always managed very efficiently by the Pontifical Council for the Laity. We came with a small delegation because it was right that we also be present, as a sign that the Jubilee event was not taking place only in Rome, but as the Pope wanted also in all the dioceses of the world. Thus, here in Krakow too the Pontiff passed through the Holy D oor. You are also one of the bishops 800 have come to Krakow who also held traditional catecheses with the various language groups. What was your experience in this regard? I sponsored two: the main theme, obviously, was that of mercy, because the motto of these catecheses was: to be blessed in the measure that one is merciful. I had a beautiful experience with two large groups of young people from different parts of Italy and I strived to make them reflect on how much the subject of mercy directly touches a person s actual life and can change our life, especially that of young people. I tried to explain that being workers of mercy means accepting Pope Fr a n c i s challenge: the spiritual and corporal works of mercy are at the basis, but those are only the starting point that then impels us to verify all the forms of poverty present in the world today, and in the world of the young there are many. At the Saturday evening vigil in the Campus Misericordiae of Krakow the Pontiff even recalled a few, exhorting that one not deprive oneself of Pope Francis calls young people to get in the game On the eve of his visit to Poland, the Pope invited the youth of the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, to become leaders. The young people had gathered on Tuesday, 26 July, in the parish of St Anne to join in spirit with those at World Youth Day in Krakow. The Pontiff sent a video message in Spanish to the Brownsville youth. The following is a translation of the transcript. Dear Young People of the Diocese of Brownsville, gathered on the Feast Day of St Anne, the grandmother of Jesus. I know that you have gathered in Texas, very close to Mexico, very close to Latin America. I know that you have gathered in order to spiritually join the World Youth Day in Krakow. I wish to be close to you. I wish to tell you to always look forward, to always look to the horizons, do not allow life to put barriers in front of you, always look to the horizon. Always have the courage to want more, more, more..., with courage but, at the same time, do not forget to look back, to the legacy that you have received from your forebears, from your grandparents, from your parents; to the legacy of faith, the Take the field the freedom to be active. It all lies in recognizing the new forms of poverty in order to be able to give space to the creative imagination of mercy and to correspond with ever new works. The next WYD will be in Panama in How should this choice be read? Let us not forget that the continents of Africa and Latin America are full of young people. There we still have a very strong presence of popular religiosity, through which children begin at birth to live the faith. But there too, challenges are arriving, to which the Church must always be vigilant, in order to direct young people toward true freedom, as Pope Francis said at the WYD vigil. Additionally it should be considered that Panama is a modern state, which can pass on to others the capacity to build the future. Lastly its geographical location favours communication with the Americas. But above all, with this choice the Pope wanted the new generations of Latin America to be motivated by a deep sense of belonging to the Church, artisans and leaders of the present and the future of their country and of the continent. faith that you now have in your hands in order to look f o r w a rd. I know that some of you might ask me: Father, yes, you tell us to look to the horizon and to remember things, but today, what am I to do?. Get in the game! Today accept life as it is and do good for others. In the world today a game is being played in which there is no room for second string, either play as a leader or you are out. Take the memory you have received, look to the horizon and, today, accept reality and carry it forward, make it bear fruit, render it fruitful. God calls you to be fruitful! God calls you to pass this life on. God calls you to create hope. God calls you to receive mercy and to give mercy. God calls you to be happy. Do not fear! Do not be afraid! Get in the game! This is how life is! I wish you a beautiful encounter as young people joining in World Youth Day, joining the young people who are in Krakow. Have enthusiasm, move forward! May the Virgin protect you, may Jesus bless you, and please, do not forget to pray for me. Thank you.

14 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 15 SI LV I A GUIDI The Bard and Mercy The many homilies of Shakespeare Shortly after proclaiming the Extraordinary Jubilee, Pope Francis cited the words that Portia, the heroine in The Merchant of Venice, addresses to Shylock during the dramatic trail scene man lexicon m e rc y, m i s e r i c o rd i a concrete, capable of changing history, but also mysterious, divine and human because it is composed of two different natures. Pardon is rarely the fruit of any human ethical effort, but it can be given by God as a free gift in response to prayer. And for that to happen it needs a yes from a human person. It needs to become incarnate in real life experience. The Jesuit Peter Milward addresses this theme in an article appearing in the latest issue of La Civiltà Cattolica entitled La qualità della misericordia in Shakespeare (The Quality of Mercy in Shakespeare). He writes that Pope Francis, shortly There is order and there is chaos, writes director Peter Brook in a beautiful book entitled The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare. There is power and the abandoning of power. There is pride, and there is humility. And yet in all these oppositions something is unspoken; something is deeply lacking. What can encompass and bind them together? Out of the opposition, which in itself can go on forever (because an opposition is dynamic and cannot graduate beyond its own level), what is lacking so that this constant dynamic opposition, on which all life as we know it is based, can be transformed?. We need something capable of unraveling every human conflict from within and break the chain of endless juxtaposition. And that something is expressed by a word that has no right to exist in any huafter proclaiming the Extraordinary Jubilee of 2016, cited the words that Portia, the heroine in The Merchant of Venice, addresses to Shylock during the dramatic trail scene. Mercy can be forced from no one: it must come directly from the heart, says Portia, disguised as a young lawyer. It must drop as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. These words throw us immediately into a biblical context: to the sapiential book of Sirach, which directly refers to mercy (35:25); to the song of Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy, which also refers to Wisdom (32:2; see also Isaiah 4:6); and to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which refer to God s love (Mt 5:45). It is twice blest, Portia continues, It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. In this way, Milward remarks, the author prepares the stage for a kind of homily on mercy. But how can he do this? Shouldn t a playwright just present the comedy at hand, critics would say, rather than climb into the pulpit? Certainly. But when a playwright wants to insert a homily into his drama, who is going to stop him? In any case, Shakespeare invites us not only to listen to the homily, but to meditate on its meaning. Actually, the more we analyze the details of the Bard s masterpieces, the stranger they become. Many monologues are in fact written in a homiletic style, and conversions and sudden turnarounds fly in the face of Aristotelian logic. We find this even in his most famous works, those we seem to know so well, like Hamlet. Deep down, the Prince of Denmark s behaviour is often inconsistent with the internal economy of the play, as Piero Boitani writes in a wonderful study entitled The Gospel according to Shakespeare (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). In fact, if we judge the play according to rigid ra- Print of Act 4, Scene 1, from The Merchant of Venice, by Salmon Balliol tionalist categories, it seems entirely incoherent, as Boitani stresses in an interview with Alessandro Zaccuri published in the July 6th edition of the newspaper Avvenire. For example, in the first part of the plot, the prince is prey to a melancholy that borders on insanity, be it feigned or real. Whatever the case may be, there is a brusque interruption between this and what follows. As soon as Hamlet returns from a mysterious journey in which he claims to have been abducted by pirates, everything changes. He recognizes the divine order in all things, he is emotionally moved by the divine providence manifested in the death of a single sparrow. There is not much in the play to help us understand this transformation. Hamlet s life was certainly in danger, and this may have contributed to his change in perspective. But the change is no less jarring for this. There are other U-turns in the drama. Hamlet abuses Ophelia in a manifestly unjust way, giving reason to suspect that the young lady s madness is, at least in part, due to the pain her fiancé has caused her. But in the second part of the play, in the scene at the cemetery, an unrecognizable Hamlet jumps into her grave and finally declares his love for her. It is a sign of repentance or at least, as Boitani points out, the beginning of something new. In a religious vein, we see here a glimmer of the hope Shakespeare will allow to shine fully in his mature fantasy plays The Winter s Tale and The Tempest. Next to the theme of divine providence is that of the human desire for redemption, which comes into full bloom at the end of Hamlet, where irrationality is given full reign. Here we must keep in mind Hamlet s relation to his friend Horatio. The two studied together at the University of Wittenberg and their conversations reveal their familiarity with philosophical and theological categories. When everything comes to light at the end of the play, Horatio is entirely aware that Hamlet is guilty of causing more than one death. The old Polonius, King Claudius, and Laertes: all have died in some way at the hand of Hamlet. And yet Horatio expresses his wish to the sweet Prince that flights of angels sing thee to thy re s t!. Boitani concludes that Shakespeare, at least in this instance, does not seem inclined to unveil the enigma. Hamlet s last words the rest is silence Laurence Olivier in the 1948 film production of Hamlet should be taken literally. Amidst everything that has happened in his life, as in any human life, there is always an impenetrable nucleus that eludes all explanation. The appeal for mercy in Me a s u re for Measure is even more overtly homiletic. The novice Isabella implores mercy not only for her brother Claudio but also for Angelo, a judge who is harsh with others but indulgent with himself, a symbol of the despicable sin of hypocrisy. Isabella speaks of mercy as a powerful, regenerative force O, think on that; / and mercy then will breathe within your lips, / like man new made capable of giving rebirth (as in 1 Cor 15). King Lear, in the play of the same name, openly declares his intention to preach using words strangely similar to those Isabella directs at Angelo and foreshadowing those of another British king, Cymbeline ( Pa rd o n s the word to all ). Particularly moving is the epilogue Shakespeare places in the mouth of Prospero, the protagonist of The Tempest: And my ending is despair, / unless I be relieved by prayer, / which pierces so that it assaults / mercy itself and frees all faults. These words, Milward notes, turn our thoughts to the humility of the greatest playwright of all time as he comes to the end of his theatrical career. Was that humility the reason Shakespeare left more than half his work unedited? It was up to two fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, to collect his works almost seven years after his death and publish them as the First Folio. Rather, what Shakespeare needed at the time was not a simple solution to the human condition, but his prayers and his audience, whom he asked explicitly to pray for him. And so, Milward concludes, despite the encomiums Shakespeare continually receives from every corner of the world as the epicentre of Western literature and the man of the millennium, we should heed his request and pray for his eternal rest as Horatio does for Hamlet.

15 page 16 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number Maurits Cornelis Escher, S e rp e n t s (xylograph, 1969). This work utilizes the fractal concept (a geometrical object that repeats itself in the same way on different scales). Recent studies show that the partitioning of prime numbers is akin to fractals. CARLO MARIA PO LVA N I * er natural number smaller than it other than 1 which can divide it into another natural number (e.g., 6 is composite because 6 divided by 3 equals 2). Prime numbers, on the other hand, whenever divided by a smaller natural number other than 1, yield a real number (e.g., 5 is prime because 5 divided by 4 equals 1.25; 5 divided by 3 equals 1.67; and 5 divided by 2 equals 2.50). Consequently, all natural even numbers (except for 2) are composite since they are multiples of 2, and all natural numbers that end in 5 (except for 5) are composite since they are multiples of 5. It also follows that all natural numbers whose digits add up to multiples of 3 cannot be prime Prime numbers and infinity Fatal attraction The mathematical initiative known as GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) just turned 20 years old. GIMPS s mission is to discover bigger and bigger prime numbers. The latest number, identified three years ago by Curtis Cooper of the University of Missouri, is so long that it would take thousands and thousands of pages to write it. This is why it is expressed using an elegant formula devised by French Minim friar Marin Mersenne ( ), a friend and fellow student of Réné Descartes ( ) at the prestigious Jesuit College of La Flèche. The number is thus written 2 74,207,281 1, which equals 2 multiplied by itself over 74 million times minus 1. Roberto Volpi, commenting on Cooper s discovery (see Il fascino dei numeri primi, un universo da esplorare in the Polemiche culturali section of Vita e Pensiero, 2015, n. 6), has reflected on the relationship between prime numbers and philosophical-theological questions. To understand that relationship, it would be helpful to give a little background on prime numbers. Integral positive numbers (0, 1, 2, 3...) are called natural in that they are distinguished from re a l numbers, which proceed through decimals (e.g., 2.75 or ). Natural numbers can be comp osite or prime. A natural number is composite when there is at least one othsince they are multiples of 3. These very simple observations are sufficient to explain why humans have been grappling with prime numbers even since prehistoric times. About twenty thousand years ago some members of homo sapiens from Lake Edward in the modern day Democratic Republic of Congo engraved a series of marks on the fibula of a baboon, representing a numeral system designed to carry out operations of multiplication and division. The so-called Ishango b one, discovered by Jean de Hinselin de Braoucourt ( ) and preserved at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, displays three columns of numbers. On the left we see prime numbers between 10 and 20: 11, 13, 17, and 19. Seeing that the futility, so to speak, of prime numbers was discovered so early, it is difficult to understand why such efforts have been put forth for their systematic identification. In fact, the larger the natural number, the more difficult it is to show that it is prime. This is because while individuating a composite number only requires us to find a single natural number that can divide it, a prime number requires us to show that dividing that number by each of the numbers smaller than it will result in a real number. In fact, no less that three of Euclid s 13 books of the Elements take into consideration the uniqueness of prime numbers. Incidentally, there have been over a thousand editions of the Elements, the most interesting of which is kept in the Vatican Library, and the Bible is the only book that has seen more editions than the Elements. The Elements is a collection of theorems assembled by the great Alexandrian mathematician during the reign of Ptolemy ( BC). Besides the contribution it makes to geometry, the Elements also contains the so-called numb er theory (for example, the branch of mathematics that deals with whole numbers). Every great mathematician has had to confront an intuition Euclid expresses in Book IX: Prime numbers are more than any assigned multitude of prime numb ers. Leonhard Euler ( ) subsequently confirmed that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. But what really drove ancient mathematicians, like Eratosthenes of Cyrene ( BC), to design algorithms in order to identify prime numbers was the fact that prime numbers can be used to write any composite number in its most basic form. If we take, for example, the number 720, which results from multiplying the numbers 2 through 6: if 2x3x4x5x6=720, then 2x3x(2x2)x5x(2x3)=720, and hence 2x2x2x2x3x3x5=720. This last equation is the most fundamental seeing that the prime numbers 2, 3, and 5 cannot be divided further, unlike the composite numbers 4 and 6. This characteristic which has become a basic feature in asymmetric cryptography (called asymmetric because the formula used to decipher the message is different from the one used to encrypt it), and is the basis of modern digital transaction systems stands at the horizon of mathematical problems, some of which remain unsolved today, regarding the frequency of prime numbers and their relationship to natural numbers. Take, for example, the hypothesis proposed by Christian Golbach ( ), according to which every even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers, such as 8=5+3 and 12=5+7. Or take the theory of twin prime numbers proposed in its primitive form by Alphonse de Polignac ( ), who presumed the existence of an infinite number of twin prime numbers separated by only one digit, such as 5 and 7 or 17 and 19 (this was the inspiration for Paolo G i o rd a n o s debut novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers, which was awarded the Strega prize in 2008). Or finally, take the hypothesis of Marie- Sophie Germain ( ), who studied the prime numbers which, multiplied by two, yield another prime number if you add 1, such as 5, since (5x2)+1=11, but not 7, since (7x2)+1=15. Neither the genius Pierre de Fermat ( ) nor the princeps mathematicorum Carl Friedrich Gauss ( ) could resist the fatal attraction of prime numbers, which, thanks to the influence they had on Bernhard Riemann ( ), would also play a key role in the mathematical aspect of the General Theory of Relativity. Having said this, who can blame Volpi when he affirms that prime numbers, even though they inhabit the domain of integers, form a universe all their own since they are the most constitutive and fundamental of all numbers? And how can anyone resist Volpi s suggestion that, even though the respective sets of natural numbers and prime numbers are infinite, the characteristics of prime numbers are such that the universe of prime numbers and the universe of natural numbers are not in the same order of infinity? The implications of this suggestion cannot be underestimated insofar as the very concept of infinity can, philosophically and theologically speaking, be open to reinterpretation. Indeed, Volpi s suggestion draws attention to that of Georg Cantor ( ), the father of set theory as well as an avid enthusiast of philosophy and theology. Cantor studied the possibility that one infinite set could be larger than another, insofar as each, in turn, is composed of infinite sets. Well aware that his proposals would shake more than a few mathematicians Jules Henry Poincaré ( ), for example, vociferously attacked him as well as more than a few theologians he kept up correspondence with high-caliber Jesuits like Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin [ ], Tilman Pesch [ ], and Joseph Hontheim [ ], the German intellectual even wrote to Pope Leo XIII to argue that his thesis not only placed the absolute infinity of God in question, but also provided a defence against determinism and materialism. Another Prussian mathematician, David Hilbert ( ), considered the most influential of the modern era and the formulator of the 23 Hilbert problems (the 23 most difficult mathematical conundrums, the first of which regards the work of Cantor and the eighth the frequency of the distribution of prime numbers), affirmed, with irreverent fideism, that no one can banish us from the Paradise Cantor has created. Volpi has given us yet another proof of that. *Official of the Secretariat of State

16 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 17 Let us ask St Cajetan for bread and w o rk, Pope Francis wrote in a letter dated 1 August to the President of the Bishops Conference of Argentina. The following is a translation of the letter which was written in Spanish. Archbishop JOSÉ MARÍA ARANCED O President of the Episcopal Conference of Argentina Dear Brother, in several days we shall celebrate the Feast of St Cajetan. Through you I would like to convey my greeting and my blessing to the many men and women who have gathered in the country s various churches dedicated to the Saint in order to ask for bread and work or to thank him because these are not lacking. Letter to the President of the Argentine Episcopate on the occasion of the Feast of St Cajetan Bread and work With emotion I recall 7 August in Buenos Aires. First, the Mass in the Shrine of Liniers and then the people standing in line up to the Stadium of Vélez. To greet, listen to, support the faith of this simple people... and many times, before the hardship of men and women who seek work and do not find it..., it was possible only to shake a hand, give a caress, look into those eyes damp with pain, and to weep inside. To weep, yes, because it is hard to go through life with the father of a family who wants work but does not have the opportunity to obtain it. Let us ask St Cajetan for bread and work. Bread is easier to obtain because there is always some good person or institution who offers it to you, at least in Argentina, where our people are very solidary. There are places in the world that do not even have this possibility. But work is very difficult to obtain, especially when one continues to experience times in which unemployment figures are significantly high. Bread resolves a part of the problem, however only half, because this bread is not what is earned with one s labour. It is one thing to have bread to eat at home and it is another to bring it home as the fruit of labour. This is what gives dignity. When we ask for work we are asking to be able to feel dignity; and in this celebration of St Cajetan let us ask for the dignity that work confers; to be able to be a bread-winner. Tra b a j o [Labour], the term in Spanish, with its T (together with two other Ts, Tetto and Terra [Lo dging and Land]) is among the fundamental concepts of Human Rights. When we ask for work in order to earn bread to support the family, we are asking for dignity. The wisdom of our people has an adage that characterizes one who, being able to work, does not do so: he lives off of the disadvantage of others. Our people does not have a high opinion of those who live off of others disadvantage, because they rightly perceive a certain lack of dignity in them. Dear Arancedo, I hope that on the Feast of St Cajetan all of we Bishops are able to accompany our brothers and sisters who ask for bread and work, and that we do so with affection, closeness and prayer. Let us also ask for this grace: that we may never lack work, the work which the Lord sends us and which gives us dignity. Please, do not forget to pray for me. May Jesus bless you and may the Blessed Virgin help you. Fr a t e r n a l l y, FRANCIS The Pope s greeting The Olympics are for everyone May the courage and strength that you bring to the Olympic Games serve as a cry for peace and solidarity. Pope Francis conveyed this wish in a letter to the Refugee Team taking part in the Rio Olympics, which officially opened on 5 August. In his letter, the Pope expressed his hope that, with the participation of these athletes, all of humanity will understand that peace is possible, and that with peace you can achieve everything; whereas with war you can lose everything. The Pope also dedicated a tweet to the games, launched from his May you always be messengers of goodwill and true sporting spirit. The team of refugees present in Rose Nathike Lokonyen of the Refugee Olympic Team leads her delegation into the Maracanã Stadium (E PA ) Rio is made up of 10 athletes (six men and four women), who marched on Friday the 5th into Maracanã Stadium carrying the Olympic flag. The team includes two swimmers from Syria, two judo athletes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and six runners from Ethiopia and South Sudan. They all had to flee from violence and persecution and have found ent languages, they represent a single population of over 60 million people who have fled; people who share pain and hope, and seek a better future. These refugees have no home, they have no team, they have no national anthem, said Thomas Bach, President of the Olympic Committee. We are offering them a home in the Olympic Village together with all the other athletes of the The Olympic cauldron burning during the opening ceremony (Reuters) refuge in other countries. Yusra Mardini, an 18-year-old Syrian refugee living in Lesvos, saved dozens of people, together with her sister, by pushing a boat to shore. Though these athletes speak differworld. The Olympic anthem will be played in their honour, and the Olympic flag will lead them into the Olympic Stadium, added Bach. At least three billion people from around the world watched the grand opening ceremony, held in the refurbished Maracanã stadium, which holds 60,000 spectators. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, one of the three creative directors, decided to organize the show around two key themes: respect for the environment and multiculturalism. The show did not disappoint. More than 5,000 volunteers and 300 artistic producers contributed to its production. Three tons of fireworks were used. Law enforcement and military were present to ensure the safety of some 80,000 people there for the celebration. Worldwide Prayer Network Sports a vehicle of fraternity Through sports it s possible to build a culture of encounter, for everyone, for a world of peace : with these words Francis presented his universal prayer intention for the month of August, which took on special significance on the eve of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The message is accessible on the website of the Pope s Worldwide Prayer Network: (sponsored by the Apostleship of Prayer). In Spanish though the video is available with subtitles in six languages on the Pontiff confides his dream of sports as a practice of human dignity, turned into a vehicle of fraternity among nations around the world. The Pope s words are set to footage of five young athletes breaking down a brick wall. Do we want exercise together, with this prayer intention, so that sports may promote fraternal encounter among peoples and contribute to the cause of peace in the world?. More than a question, it is an appeal to direct sports towards the tearing down of the walls of indifference. Like other videos before it, the film was directed by the communications agency La Machi. Production and distribution was overseen by the Vatican Television Centre, which recorded the images.

17 page 18 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number Holy See intervention on children and armed conflict The drama of war The phenomenon of unaccompanied migrant minors Invisible stories of inconceivable pain LUCA M. PO S S AT I The phenomenon is dramatically growing, and is a tragedy within the tragedy. Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children are left alone and too often become easy targets for unscrupulous traffickers. Relaunching this alert is the new report, published on 27 July by the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI), which is on the front line in monitoring assistance. According to their research, in almost 10 years, the number of unaccompanied migrant children has practically doubled: in 2004 there was talk of 7,870 minors assisted in the country, and in 2014 there were 13,523 out of a total of 26,000 migrant minors who arrived in Italy. The largest increase coincided with the outbreak of the war in Syria, when the number grew in just a few months from 4,588 in 2010 to 9,197 in According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, Giovanna Di Benedetto told our newspaper Giovanna is the current spokeswoman for Save the Child re n and for years has been active in assisting refugees and migrants, the largest group of unaccompanied minors are African, and specifically Gambians, Egyptians, Eritreans, Guineans, Somalis, Nigerians and Ivorians. The areas of origin are mainly Sub-Saharan Africa and the Horn of Africa, while unaccompanied Syrian minors are not as num e ro u s. These minors carry with them stories of unprecedented violence, which are ignored by the media. Some flee because they have lost their families, others have left in secret. Others, however, leave in order to support families who are in debt to traffickers. These people, Di Benedetto said, are mostly Egyptians: they arrive in Italy and are forced to work to repay debts, and then become trapped in illegal work and exploitation. Girls, especially Nigerians, end up trapped in networks of criminal organizations that exploit prostitution. Often the journey to Europe itself is already extremely traumatic. Africans experience difficult stages such as crossing the desert, or according to witnesses a terrible sojourn in Libya awaiting their departure. And once they arrive? After landing, Di Benedetto explained, these children are sent to the first reception facility where, in theory, they should remain for about two to three years. In reality, however, the time ends up being much longer due to the high number of people arriving; once past the first stage, they are welcomed into other facilities, smaller communities of 10 to 12 people, where they face the road to integration. There are, however, critical issues. And unfortunately, they are many, and not only in Italy: As minors, according to Italian law, these unaccompanied youth are entitled to be welcomed regardless of their country of origin. This is an Italian rule, however, and is shared by few other countries, but not by Europe. On this issue, the EU has remained stagnant, raising barriers, without offering assistance, without understanding that behind these minors are stories of unimaginable violence, said Di Benedetto. In Italy, however, a unified national system of assistance and protection for unaccompanied migrant minors is lacking. The necessity of one unified national system of assistance and protection is also insisted upon by Umberto Di Primio, Vice President of ANCI. The situation requires a system of reception and structured integration that is effectively spread throughout the national territory, he said. We need to address certain crucial issues, such as increasing the number of places in the first and second reception networks, and reducing the amount of time it takes to appoint guardians and the time for issuing residence permits. The following is a statement given by Archbishop Bernardito, Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, on 2 August, at the Security Council Open Debate on Children and Armed Conflict in New York. Mr President, My Delegation wishes to thank the Malaysian Presidency for convening this particularly important Open Debate on Children and Armed Conflict, and conveys to Malaysia its appreciation for all that it has done and will continue to do as Chair of the Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict. The year 2014 was described as the worst year for children affected by armed conflict. But as the Secre t a r y - G e n e r a l s Report on Children and Armed Conflict covering the year 2015 illustrates, the 2014 horror-list has been surpassed by the number of children caught in armed conflicts and the scale and severity of violations in As the Secretary-General states in his Report, The impact on children of our collective failure to prevent and end conflict is severe, and the present Report highlights the increased intensity of grave violations in a number of situations of armed conflict. No one can ignore this damning observation. Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such violent brutality: children used as soldiers, suicide bombers, sex slaves, and disposable intelligence-gatherers in the most dangerous military operations. The deliberate destruction of their schools and hospitals in total disregard of international humanitarian law has become a strategy of war. These crimes must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. As the Report of the Secretary- General points out, while there has been progress in the overall protection of children caught in armed conflict, much more must be done. Governments must be held accountable for the full and complete implementation of action plans and commitments they have taken to end and prevent all recruitment of child-soldiers. In the fight against non-state armed groups and terrorism, States are urged to ensure that their responses to all threats against peace and security are conducted in full compliance with international humanitarian law, to ensure that children are not victimized twice. My Delegation fully agrees with the Report that the use of airstrikes and explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas exacerbates the dangers to which children caught in armed conflict are exp osed. Moreover, double standards, or even a perception of double standards, in listing and delisting perpetrators must be avoided, since it encourages disregard for international humanitarian law, frustrates the implementation of commitments and action plans, and discourages Governments and other concerned institutions from making stronger commitments and action plans. Mr President, The Holy See has been a constant partner of the United Nations in opposing not only the use of children as combatants, but the many other forms of violence against children caught in armed conflict. Through its various structures operating in most of the conflict zones, the Catholic Church is actively engaged in taking care of the victims of such violence. Over the years, Holy See structures and numerous Catholic institutions have collaborated with UN Pe a c e k e e p i n g Missions and Agencies to help alleviate the sufferings of children in armed conflict and to share best practices to address this ongoing scourge. Expressing deep appreciation for all those who work in this area, the Holy See hopes that the plight of children caught in armed conflict will awaken consciences, lead to a change of heart, and inspire all parties to lay down their arms and take up the path of dialogue. Considering the best interest of children and the fundamental role of parents, my Delegation encourages Governments to affirm and support families of children who are victimized in armed conflict. They must be assisted in overcoming prejudices against child survivors of armed conflicts, in particular against women and girls who are victims of rape, and in welcoming back children into the family fold. Moreover, while the International Community plays an important role in supporting States in their primary responsibility to protect their citizens, it must also interact with the local communities affected by violence against children in armed conflict so that solutions and programs can emerge organically, while fostering local ownership. A solution to the plight of children caught in armed conflict, in particular of child soldiers, requires sensitivity to finding ways to reintegrate these children back into their own communities. While we witness barbaric acts beyond anyone s imagination committed also by child soldiers, we must remember that these children are exploited and manipulated into what they have become. Thus, while their reintegration into society requires that we recognize the atrocities they may have committed, we must also build pathways for counseling and reconciliation with a view to accomplishing fully that reintegration. Mr President, The obligation to put an end to barbaric acts against children caught in armed conflict is incumbent upon every one of us. In a particular way, it is incumbent upon this Council, as it calls on all States to put in place and implement stronger measures for the protection of children in armed conflict, and as it ensures that UN peacekeeping operations strictly adhere to all laws and measures in this regard. Thank you, Mr President.

18 number 32-33, Friday, August 2016 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO page 19 St Martin de Porres in a work by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel From 27 to 30 August, a continental Celebration of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy will take place in Bogotá, Columbia. The Celebration was convoked and organized by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America (CAL) together with the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM), in collaboration with the episcopates of the United States and Canada. The event will be presided by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, President of CAL, accompanied by his collaborators and by Cardinal Rubén Salazar, Archbishop of Bogotá and President of CELAM. The Church of the Americas will be assembled in Bogotá to live the Jubilee as a sign of the communion of the churches of the whole continent. It will be one of the greatest ecclesiastical event of the year. Having passed the halfway point of the Jubilee Year, in Bogotá the initiatives, experiences and works already carried out, as well as the fruits received, will be briefly summarized. The celebration proposes that this year of grace be lived as a renewed impetus to the continental mission, especially in light of the Aparecida document and the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Pastors from the local Churches together with rectors of National Marian Shrines, male and female religious superiors, heads of different works of mercy in American countries, American directors of associations, ecclesial movements and new communities, priests and lay people working in different ecclesial, social and popular areas will all be taking A continental celebration of the Extraordinary Jubilee to be held in Bogotá A land of Mercy part. Much more than a congress, this initiative constitutes a great event. And, for this reason, its program foresees four addresses: the first by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, on the theme This is the Great Time of Mercy ; the second by Cardinal Ouellet, entitled The Church, Sacrament of Mercy ; the third by Fr Eduardo Chavez, Canon of the Basilica of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, on Holiness in the Times of Francis ; and the fourth, on Mercy as the Soul of a Culture of Encounter, Forgiveness and Reconciliation on the American Continent, which will be presented jointly by Archbishop Luis Augusto Castro Quiroga of Tunja, President of the Colombian Bishops Conference, together with Archbishop José Horacio Gómez of Los Angeles. Another major moment of the Celebration will be dedicated to the American saints. Indeed, the entire event is being presented under the motto taken from an expression of Pope Francis when on 2 May 2015 he made the invocation: May a powerful gust of holiness sweep through all the Americas during the coming Extraordinary Jubilee of M e rc y!. Several speakers will talk about: the missionary saints of the first evangelization, who include: Bishop Laval, José de Anchieta, Junípero Serra; the saintly priests: Toribio de Mogrovejo, Rafael Guizar y Valencia, Brochero; the saintly mystics: Rose of Lima, Mariana of Quito, Teresa of the Andes; the saints of the defenceless: Peter Claver, Laura Montoya, Mother Cabrini; the saints of charity: Martin de Porres, Katharine Drexel, Peter of St Joseph of Betancur; Mexico s martyr saints: Kateri Tekakwitha, Oscar A. Romero; and the educator saints: Miguel Febres Cordero, John Neumann. An entire day will be dedicated to Works of Mercy on the American continent. A panel will meet to discuss some of the most significant ones, such as the Hogar de Cristo (Christ s Home) in Chile, the Fazendas da Esperanza (Hop e Farms), Project Rachel, and migrant assistance centres. Additionally, all participants may visit different sites of corporal and spiritual works of mercy, particularly in the poorest areas and environs of Bogotá. The event will end with a Continental Rosary for Peace, to be followed by the celebration of the Holy Eucharist presided by Cardinal Rubén Salazar Gómez. The American Celebration of the Jubilee of Mercy will conclude with Cardinal O uellet s intervention. Initiatives of the US bishops following incidents of racial violence Overcoming suspicion and enmity A special task force for the promotion of peace and reconciliation among communities who live in situations of racial tension, and a national Day of Prayer to be held in all dioceses of the country on 9 September. Catholic bishops in the US have launched these two initiatives in the wake of the recent incidents of violence and racial tension between various factions and law enforcement. The situations, which occurred in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis and Dallas, have caused numerous casualties on both sides. In recent weeks these episodes have caused the country to slip back into an atmosphere of horror, imbued with feelings of hatred and vengeance. It is an atmosphere that, as we know, the US previously experienced in a terrible way during the 1960s. The task force, to be chaired by Archbishop Wilton Daniel Gregory of Atlanta, who from 2001 to 2004 led the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), will be sustainably composed of five bishops and will also rely on the collaboration and advice of lay experts as well as that of Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, the Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Vice President of the episcopate, and bishops whose dioceses have been particularly affected by violence. The commission as explained on the USCCB website will aim to help bishops engage the challenging problems directly, by various means: gathering and disseminating supportive resources and best practices ; actively listening to the concerns of members in troubled communities and law enforcement; and building strong relationships to help prevent and resolve conflicts. On 8 July, in response to the latest incidents of violence, Archbishop Joseph Edward Kurtz of Louisville, President of the USCCB, noted the need for the Catholic Church to find new ways of accompanying and helping the local communities that are experiencing dangerous incidents of racial violence. The initiatives announced seem to aim precisely at meeting these needs. I have stressed the need to look toward additional ways of nurturing an open, honest and civil dialogue on issues of race relations, restorative justice, mental health, economic opportunity, and addressing the question of pervasive gun violence, explained Archbishop Kurtz, who said that both the Day of Prayer and the Task Force will help us advance in that direction, and in this way to take a step forward to embrace the suffering, through unified, concrete action animated by the love of Christ. In this sense, the hope is to help nurture peace and build bridges of communication and mutual aid in our own communities.

19 page 20 L OSSERVATORE ROMANO Friday, August 2016, number The Cardinal Secretary of State on the Holy Father s visits to the Caucasus region A peacemaker With great humility Francis seeks to encourage every initiative of dialogue MAU R I Z I O FO N TA N A Shortly after the release of Pope Fr a n c i s schedule for his visit to Georgia and Azerbaijan, which will take place from 30 September to 2 October, Cardinal Pietro Parolin spoke about the complex situation in the Caucasus region. By linking the Pontiff s visit with the recent trip to Armenia, Cardinal Parolin traced the framework of the efforts that Francis has carried out in favour of dialogue and peace. In this interview with our newspaper the Secretary of State also addressed the issues of ecumenism, persecution in the Middle East, the role played by major religions in building more just societies, the conflict in Nagorno- Ka r a b a k h and referring to Pope Fr a n c i s words during the press conference on his return from Yerevan the particular European situation following the Brexit. what the Pope called viable solutions, that is, those ways which are actually viable? This is a general hope that the Pope expressed in Armenia and which I believe remains valid even for the subsequent stops of the visit in the South Caucasus. Regarding the viable solutions on the concrete issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, an international instrument already exists which was created by the OSCE and is called the Minsk Group. I must note that, after the painful resurgence of conflict at the beginning of April, the representatives of that entity spoke of relaunching initiatives in pursuit of a lasting solution, possibly through some compromise between Parties. All that remains is the hope that these efforts will bear f ru i t. Addressing the Armenian Catholicos Karekin II, the Pope hoped to be able The trip to Armenia was the first stop on a larger itinerary for the Caucasus to move towards full communion. The ecumenical aspect was one of the main region. What are the characteristics elements of the recent trip. What progress and particular problems of this region has been made? that is considered to be geopolitically Whenever we speak of ecumenical s t ra t e g i c? relations, we are referring to a reality I would say that it is quite easy to of grace: it is a grace from the Lord see that the Pope has a strong desire to meet, to speak, and to recite to be a peacemaker wherever he words of Christian prayer together. goes. In this sense, even political They are part of this journey of situations or strategic plans, so to grace, of course, as well as efforts of theological reflection and joint declarations, such as the one signed by Pope Francis and Catholicos Karekin II in Etchmiadzin near the end of the trip. This confirms, despite the persistent divisions between Christians, that what unites us is much greater than what divides us, and reaffirms the importance of developing a deeper and more effective collaboration not only in theology but also in prayer and active cooperation at the local level. The Pope s homage to the victims of Metz Yeghern, 25 June However, in my opinion, the cultivation of personal relationships speak, pass into the background. In is crucial, beginning with those this concrete case, I do not think we between Church leaders. Therefore, can assume an easy solution to all of there really is reason to rejoice in the problems that concern the Caucasus observing the frequency of mutual region. They require effort, visits that have taken place between political will and a readiness to compromise. the Popes and the heads of the Ar- However, Pope Francis is menian Apostolic Church in recent visiting the Caucasus countries with decades! This is also due to the fact great humility, seeking first to listen, that this dialogue not only concerns to understand, and consequently to the leaders, but is perceived more encourage every initiative for dialogue generally among the respective constituencies. and openness towards others. During the ecumenical meeting and the Prayer for Peace in Yerevan on 25 June, Pope Francis referred to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and called for a peaceful solution. Can the recent trip to Armenia and the next trip to Azerbaijan facilitate the identification of During this last visit, the media was focused on the question of terminology of the Armenian genocide. The Pope, though using this category, has indicated a path that from historical memory leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Was this gateway understood by all of the parties involved? At the Ecumenical Prayer Vigil for Peace in Yerevan, 25 June As rightly pointed out, if Pope Francis uses certain words or expressions he usually does so in order to sympathize with the pain of those before him, to express his closeness to the suffering and to entrust them to the Lord through prayer. In the concrete case, we are dealing with something even larger: I think the Holy Father has been quite clear with his gestures and words, moved by a unique and profound desire that, from all Parties and therefore also from the side of those who have suffered great injustices in the past, we will move towards a sincere openness and to a willingness to seek, at least gradually, forgiveness and reconciliation. I will mention just a few lines of the speech he delivered in his meeting with civil authorities and the diplomatic corps, where he hoped to multiply, on behalf of everyone, the efforts in order that in international disputes dialogue, a constant and genuine search for peace, collaboration between States and the unwavering commitment of the international organizations will always prevail in order to build an atmosphere of trust that is conducive to achieving lasting agreements that look to the future. The meeting with representatives of the Armenian community both Apostolic and Catholic of the diaspora, has once again shed light on the drama of persecutions against Christians in the Middle East. Which actions are desirable on the part of both the international politicians and the religious l e a d e rs? What the Middle East needs most urgently is peace, a peace pursued through the instruments of negotiation and political dialogue, in order to put in place a sufficiently solid foundation for the future. Everyone must work together for this purpose. It is up to religious leaders, among others, to convey to their followers the conviction that the only possible path is that of mutual respect, reconciliation, and the ability to live and grow together, without seeing diversity as a threat, but rather as a source of enrichment. Only in this way can you build or rebuild a just and cohesive society, where no persons, including Christians and other minorities, are subjected to hostility or even persecution, but are full members of their countries, capable of making a significant contribution in favour of material and spiritual development. Those places where Christians and other minorities have difficulties in returning to their homes, due to lack of security and stable conditions, including economic conditions, need great gestures of generosity from the international community in order to restore ordinary life to those tormented regions as soon as possible. In the press conference that took place during the return flight from Yerevan, the Pope spoke on the topic of Europe, with the jolt brought about by the Brexit. What is it that the Old Continent needs today? We are facing a particular historical moment, which many believe calls for a reconsideration of Europe. There are those who are asking for a greater Europe, hoping for more integration, and those who would prefer it to a lesser extent, stressing the need for supranational structures to be closer to the needs of the population and that more space be left to individual States. The British vote was really a shock, which highlighted that there is a plurality of instances on the continent that need to be confronted. It is now necessary to ensure that this crisis will be transformed into an opportunity for deeper reflection. I believe that in this context the Churches and Christian communities may also play an important role, first by helping people to understand the challenges that Europe is called to face today, but also by promoting dialogue between the various authorities in order to overcome mistrust and to build those bridges which are greatly needed not only by Europe but by the whole world.