The Last Word
Perspectives from the president by Msgr. Peter I. Vaccari
“On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and exclaimed, ‘Let everyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as scripture says: “Rivers of living water will flow from within him.” ’ ” (Jn 7:37-38)
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n 8 May, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope, successor of St. Peter. He chose the name Leo XIV. This native son of Chicago is the first successor of St. Peter elected from the United States. CNEWA-Pontifical Mission gives thanks to God and the movement of the Holy Spirit among the cardinal electors. I urge our readers and supporters to read and to pray with Pope Leo’s address to the participants of the Jubilee of the Eastern Churches on Wednesday, 14 May. In his address he echoes the sentiment of Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, in holding up the unique traditions of the Eastern churches. In addition, he recognizes the insight that Pope St. John Paul II shares in his encyclical “Orientale Lumen” on the unique historic role of the Eastern churches “ ‘as the original setting where the church was born.’ ” This issue of ONE pays tribute to Pope Francis and introduces Pope Leo XIV in light of CNEWA’s mission. The most popular image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, painted by Pompeo Batoni in 1767, is housed in Rome’s Church of the Gesù.
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Pope Francis was a strong advocate and shepherd for the Eastern churches. Within the first 10 days of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV demonstrated this same solicitude for the Eastern churches, as well as for the challenges and issues they face in the regions of the world where CNEWA works and where the experience of raw physical thirst is a story all too familiar. However, beyond physical thirst, so many in our world experience deep and varied forms of thirst. How often do we feel the desert thirst for greater meaning and purpose, the thirst for adequate work to support our families, the thirst for meaningful relationships? The thirst to love and to be loved? The thirst for a life of greater virtue, that is, of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance? The litany of our thirsts could go on. In his encyclical on the Sacred Heart (“Dilexit nos”), issued last October, Pope Francis traces the biblical journey of God, who also thirsts. Yes, God thirsts to hold his people in the embrace of his love by promising them lifegiving water that will free them from the desert and cleanse them from their sins. The culmination of that divine thirst comes in the audacity of the mystery of the Incarnation, when God