The entire month of June and
the first part July promise to be extremely busy for Pope Francis. Over
the course of the next six weeks, he will make two international trips
and also travel to Northern Italy for a two-day pilgrimage to venerate
the Shroud of Turin.
Francis begins his travels on June 6 when he flies to Sarajevo, the
multi-ethnic and multi-religious capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The
daylong visit comes two decades after a still-fragile peace ended a
horrific three-year war that devastated the city and the region.
It will be Francis’s eighth voyage outside of Italy, but only the third time within Europe.
His ninth foreign journey will be more ambitious and physically
taxing—a three-country tour of South America (Ecuador, Bolivia and
Paraguay), from July 5-12.
In between these trips abroad the pope will go to Turin, home of the
alleged burial cloth of Jesus Christ. That June 21-22 visit is packed
with events. The most historic will be Francis’s meeting with members of
the Waldensian Evangelical Church. He will be the first Bishop of Rome
to enter a house of worship belonging to Italy’s largest Protestant
community, which dates back to the twelfth century.
Travels hither and yon are just the most dramatic events on the early
summer papal calendar. But they are in not the only ones that will test
the pope’s stamina.
On Wednesday he had his first of several large gatherings this month
in Rome in a sun-baked St. Peter’s Square, where he spent a couple of
hours with the tens of thousands of people that came for his weekly
general audience.
He’ll be going to his Cathedral of St. John Lateran Thursday to
celebrate the annual outdoor Mass for the Feast of Corpus Christi and
will then make the nearly one-mile-long Eucharistic procession to the
Basilica of Saint Mary Major.
Francis will be back at the Lateran a week later to preside at Mass
for the Charismatic Renewal’s Worldwide Priests’ Retreat. And don’t
forget the June 29 Feast of Saints Peter & Paul… and few other
events in between.
With such a schedule, it’s no wonder the seventy-eight-year-old pope constantly asks people to pray for him.
****
Regular readers of the “Letter from Rome” may remember me
talking about Msgr. Pietro Sigurani as one of the Eternal City’s most inspiring preachers and a tireless servant of immigrants, the poor, and the needy.
A few months ago I wrote about the
daily sit-down lunches
that “Don Pietro” and his helpers offer to the city’s poor right inside
little Basilica of Sant’Eustachio, near the Pantheon. The
seventy-eight-year-old priest has been rector of the baroque church
since the end of 2012, shortly after he was “retired” from thirty-some
years as pastor of the thriving Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ Parish
just beyond the Lateran.
Don Pietro is a beggar when it comes to soliciting help for the poor and, because he walks the talk, people give.
A few weeks ago he asked his “parishioners” to chip in for a special initiative.
“I want to take our poor friends to Turin to see the shroud,” he said.
“You can believe the shroud’s authentic or not; that doesn’t really
interest me,” he continued. “But I do know that is the suffering image
of the poor and our poor should have the privilege of reverencing it.”
He asked for donations to help pay for the six-hour bus ride and a
night in a hotel for about eighty people. The idea was met with
enthusiasm.
A couple of weeks later Don Pietro had good and surprising news. He
said he had called the Archdiocese of Turin to request a special viewing
of the shroud and Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia offered to house and feed
the pilgrims.
Then the news got even better. Just a few days ago the Vatican’s
almoner, Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, informed the community that Pope
Francis would pay for transportation.
In fact, he’s also paying for an even larger group of homeless and
poor people that left from Rome Wednesday with Fr. Antonio Nicolai,
pastor of Santa Lucia Parish, not far from the Vatican. Don Pietro and
his friends of Sant’Eustachio will go to Turin next week.
****
“Here’s how the press ignores Pope Francis when he rails against abortion.”
That’s a pretty accurate translation of a
headline that appeared Monday on the Italian news site
Formiche .
Niccolò Mazzarino, the author of the article that followed, chastised
journalists (presumably his Italian colleagues) for ignoring the pope’s
condemnation of abortion in a speech last Saturday to an Italian
pro-life organization called Science & Life.
He lamented that many writers had, instead, cherry-picked this single
line from his talk: “Letting our brothers and sisters die on boats in
the Channel of Sicily is an attack on life.”
In fact, abortion and the boat deaths were just the first two of six
different “attacks on life” that Francis listed in mantra-like fashion.
The others were work-related deaths due to faulty safety; deaths
caused by lack of nutrition; deaths brought by terrorism, war, and
violence; and, finally, euthanasia. All attacks on life, according to
Pope Francis.
Presumably, many of the Italian journalists focused on his condemnation of the boat deaths because the
immigration and refugee crisis that has contributed to them is a major news story right now.
The conservative American news site,
Breitbart , did just the opposite.
“Pope Francis: ‘Scourge of abortion is attack on life’,” was its headline. It then
reported only on the pope’s condemnation of abortion and ignored all the rest.
Actually,
Breitbart’s real interest, it seems, was to use
the Pope’s words as a club with which to beat “the pro abort” U.S. House
Minority leader, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), for claiming to be a
“mainstream Catholic.”
Here’s a quote from the piece: “On two of the biggest social justice
issues of our day—abortion and gay marriage—Pelosi has taken a hard-line
stand in direct opposition to Church teaching, something resembling a
‘faithful’ Greenpeace member advocating baby seal killing or an orthodox
Jew pushing pork.”
And another: “This past January, Ms. Pelosi said that she knew ‘more
about having babies than the pope,’ and that a woman has ‘the right’ to
an abortion.”
The article was signed, “Thomas D. Williams Ph.D.”
In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the former Legionary of
Christ who left the priesthood two years ago to marry Liz Lev, the
daughter Mary Ann Glendon and mother of the child they had out of
wedlock back in 2005.
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