POPE’S PRAYER INTENTION WE PRAY FOR ALL THOSE SUFFERING FROM RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION AND PERSECUTION; MAY THEIR OWN RIGHTS AND DIGNITY BE RECOGNIZED.
THE MONTH OF JANUARY IS DEDICATED TO THE HOLY NAME OF JESUS.
NAT IONA L CAT HOLIC R EGIST ER
NEWS AND PERSPECTIVES FROM ROME
7
JA N UA RY 2-15, 2 022
Controversies and Gains at the Holy See
CALM AND COMFORT AMID DEVASTATION. Above, Pope Francis speaks at a square near the ruins of the Syriac Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception (al-Tahira-l-Kubra), in the old city of Iraq’s northern Mosul, on March 7. Pope Francis, on his historic Iraq tour, visited Christian communities that endured the brutality of the Islamic State group until the jihadists’ ‘caliphate’ was defeated in 2018. At left, during a December trip that focused heavily on the plight of migrants, the Pope greets a woman holding a child after an ecumenical prayer with migrants at the Church of the Holy Cross near the United Nations buffer zone in the Cypriot city of Nicosia, Europe’s last divided capital. Vincenzo Pinto and Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
y e a r i n r ev i ew BY P E T E R J E S S E R E R S M I T H S TA F F W R I T E R
PAPAL BIRTHDAY PARTY. Pope Francis celebrated his 85th birthday Dec. 19 with children of migrants and refugees cared for by the Santa Marta Dispensary. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
CONTENTIOUS CLAMPDOWN. With the July publication of Pope Francis’ apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes, the Vatican placed Church-wide restrictions on the ability and availability of the traditional Latin Mass. Archbishop Arthur Roche, at left, named prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in May, announced in late December a set of guidelines to further explain the papal document, which place further prohibitions on the extraordinary form. Both the papal document and subsequent guidelines have faced withering criticism. Shutterstock/Pigama and 2015 CNA photo/Bohumil Petrik
SWIMMING THE TIBER. Prominent Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali was received into the Catholic Church’s Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in October, saying he was convicted by the Church’s moral and doctrinal authority and its sacramental tradition. 2009 Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The Year of St. Joseph saw Pope Francis put on the shoes of the fisherman to make apostolic journeys where the witness of the Successor of Peter the Apostle was most needed. But it also saw controversies from the Vatican, as well. In March, the Holy Father traveled to Iraq, where he gathered with the Christian community there and also met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite Muslim leader of Iraq. The visit was considered vital to encourage the remaining Christians, and it gave Iraq’s government a needed boost. “They lived three days in happiness,” Hanna, a Syriac Catholic, told the Register. For once, out of four decades of war and violence, she said, “the news was beautiful,” and people saw “this was a home, not just a country.” The Holy Father made additional apostolic journeys to Hungary, Slovakia, Cyprus and Greece. In the last two countries, the Holy Father continued ecumenical outreach to the Orthodox and appealed for forgiveness for the wounds caused by Latin Rite Catholics. Pope Francis reiterated his desire to go to Moscow and meet with Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. A meeting between the two is likely to have greater urgency, with the specter of war between Russia and Ukraine. The Vatican announced in March, and officially opened in October, the three-year process
for the Synod on Synodality, with its diocesan, national, continental and global phases. The process is intended to help the Church rediscover its synodal character and how the Church makes decisions. “Celebrating a synod means walking on the same road, together,” the Pope said in October. “Let us look at Jesus, who encounters the rich man on the road; he then listens to his questions, and, finally, he helps him discern what he must do to inherit eternal life.” During this time, the German “Synodal Path,” which Pope Francis warned should focus on evangelization, ground to a halt over controversies on the priesthood and same-sex blessings. Originally supposed to wrap up in 2021, it is now extended to February 2022. At the Vatican, Pope Francis made key changes to lay ministry in 2021. The Holy Father officially opened the ministry of acolyte and lector to women, and then he instituted the ministry of catechist. In decreeing the institution of catechists, the Pope stated that lay ministers should be “faithful co-workers with priests and deacons, prepared to exercise their ministry wherever it may prove necessary, and motivated by true apostolic enthusiasm.” At the Vatican, an emphasis was placed on promoting the teaching on marriage and family contained in the Pope’s apostolic teaching in Amoris Laetitia, but celebration of the Year of St. Joseph was left largely to local Churches. On Catholic teaching and discipline, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed the Church’s teaching against blessing same-sex “marriage” amid the push in some
70 YEARS A PRIEST. Pope Emeritus Benedict, praying in 2010 before the Marian icon known as the Advocata in Rome’s Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, quietly celebrated the 70th anniversary of his ordination on the Solemnity of Peter and Paul June 29. National Catholic Register/Vatican Media
Church circles to recognize it. Pope Francis also has continued to deal with the fallout of the abuse crisis in Europe. The year saw the Vatican prosecute more bishops in Poland for their failures on sexual abuse under the landmark legislation Vos Estis and the promulgation of a new book of canon law that gave the Church’s law more tools to carry out law and order. Pope Francis’ decision in July, shortly after life-threatening surgery, to issue Traditionis Custodes (Guardians of the Tradition) — a motu proprio rescinding Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum, which liberalized the availability of the traditional Latin Mass — generated enormous controversy and criticism. This was exacerbated in December, when the Vatican clarified the document, which further tightened the restrictions on the celebration of the Roman Rite using the 1962 Missal and other liturgical books. But the Church also saw more prominent Anglicans enter full communion. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, a prominent Anglican bishop once in line for archbishop of Canterbury, came into full communion with the Catholic Church in October, with the Vatican’s blessing, via a personal ordinariate established by Benedict XVI to reunite Anglicans to the Catholic Church. “[I]t is the only Church where decisions that affect everyone are made so that they ‘stick,’” he told the Register about why he became Catholic, “where there is a body of doctrinal and moral teaching that can guide the faithful; and where there is a magisterium that can teach effectively.”
TALE OF TWO SYNODS. German Cardinal Walter Kasper, shown near left in 2019 in Rome, rebuked in September his brother German bishops’ ‘Synodal Path,’ saying that it deviates from ‘the sacramental understanding of the Church,’ while other critics held that the Church in Germany was on a path to schism. In October, cardinals and bishops attended Pope Francis’ Mass for the opening of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality. The worldwide synod will take place over the next two years. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP Getty Images; Vatican Pool, Getty Images
CRITICAL MASS. Pilgrims gather for a private Mass at one of the side altars of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the eighth anniversary of Pope Francis’ election in March, the Secretariat of State banned all private Masses offered at the side altars, unless they were concelebrated. Shutterstock/Photoillustrator