Holy Father's speech to Space Station shows human side of space exploration

Catholic New Agency:

Pope Benedict XVI’s planned satellite address to the crew of the International Space Station is a reminder of the humanity of astronauts and of the God-given curiosity that drives mankind to explore, Vatican astronomer Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., said.

“The astronauts are not just robots collecting data; they are people, people like us. And we human beings are motivated to study the universe, and to live and explore in new and exciting places, precisely because of our very human desire to know about and enjoy this creation,” Br. Consolmagno told CNA on May 20.

The Pope’s address reminds us of “the wonderful human side” of exploring astronomy and space, he added.

Pope Benedict will address the space station at 7:11 a.m. Eastern Time on May 21. He will particularly address the two Italian astronauts, Paolo Nespoli and Roberto Vittori. Vittori arrived at the station on the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour, which launched its final mission on May 16.

The event will be streamed live on the internet at the Vatican Radio-CTV website.

Br. Consolmagno said the broadcast had precedent in Pope Paul VI’s direct television linkup to the Apollo 11 astronauts who landed on the moon in 1969.

Though the Vatican astronomer was unsure whether the message was delivered directly to the astronauts, the Pope’s speech read:

“Honor, greetings, and blessings to you, conquerors of the Moon, pale lamp of our nights and our dreams! Bring to her, with your living presence, the voice of the Spirit, a hymn to God our Creator and our Father.

“We are close to you, with our good wishes and all our prayers. Together with the whole Catholic Church, Pope Paul the Sixth greets you.”

The Jesuit astronomer noted Pope Benedict has previously discussed his predecessor, Sylvester II, an astronomer and notable mathematician of the tenth century. Sylvester introduced much Arabic knowledge into the Christian world, including Arabic numerals, the abacus and the armillary sphere.

Br. Consolmagno explained that the desire to know and explore is at its base “a hunger for God.”

“Curiosity is a gift of God, and the ability to satisfy that curiosity with our ability to do science is a particularly human gift,” he said. “St. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans that from the beginning of time, God reveals Himself to us in the things he has created.

“Even a scientist who might think of himself as an atheist, is nonetheless driven by this desire, and is hungry to know the truth. They too worship Truth. Studying the universe, finding that Truth, is an act of worship.”

The shuttle Endeavor’s final mission will last 16 days. The shuttle brought an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and a pallet loaded with spare parts to the International Space Station. NASA says the spectrometer is “a cutting-edge physics experiment designed to look for anti-matter in the cosmos and perhaps unlock the mystery of what makes up most of the mass in the universe.”

Endeavour’s mission commander, Mark Kelley, is the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was severely wounded in an Arizona shooting in January.

Prayers requested: Holy Father calls for prayers for Church in China next week

Catholic News Agency:

Pope Benedict XVI has urged Catholics around the world to join him next week in praying for the Church in China.

“All Catholics throughout the world have a duty to pray for the Church in China: those members of the Faithful have a right to our prayers, they need our prayers,” the Pope said May 18.

Speaking at the end of his weekly audience, the Pope reminded pilgrims that May 24 is a global day of prayer for the Church in China. The date marks the feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians, who is venerated at the Shrine of Sheshan in Shanghai. The Pope established the custom of praying for China on this day back in 2007.

“By our prayers we can obtain for the Church in China that it remain one, holy and Catholic, faithful and steadfast in doctrine and in ecclesial discipline.”

China has an estimated 8 to 12 million Catholics. They are divided, though, between the state-sanctioned church that sometimes names bishops without the Vatican’s approval and an underground church wary of government ties.

“Chinese Catholics, as they have said many times, want unity with the universal Church, with the Supreme Pastor, with the Successor of Peter,” said the Pope. He added that prayer from others around the world was key to making that happen.

“We can help them to find the path to keep their faith alive, to keep their hope strong, to keep their love for all people ardent, and to maintain in its integrity the ecclesiology that we have received from the Lord and the Apostles.”

Pope Benedict finished his remarks by asking Mary “to enlighten those who are in doubt, to call back the straying, to console the afflicted, and to strengthen those who are ensnared by the allure of opportunism.”

Pope Benedict urges Venetian Catholics to continue to build bridges

Catholic Culture:

During a weekend visit to Venice, Pope Benedict XVI challenged Catholics to uphold their city’s rich tradition as “a crossroads of peoples and of communities.”

Venice, the Pope said, has a vocation for “promoting a culture of welcoming and sharing, capable of building bridges of dialogue between peoples and nations.” His message was clearly intended to counter to anti-immigrant sentiments in Italy.

Pope Benedict also underlined the need to uphold Christian beliefs in a culture marked by advancing secularization. He urged listeners to “courageously promote and defend the unity of the faith” and to address “the vast and disturbing issues that pose a crisis” to the European civilization founded on Christian faith. “Be saints!” the Pope exhorted the 300,000 people who attended an outdoor Mass in San Giuliano de Mestre Park on Sunday, May 8. “Put Christ at the center of your lives.” During several public appearances in a visit that lasted less than 24 hours, the Pope—who traveled across the city in boats, along the famous canals—frequently reminded the people of Venice of their rich Catholic heritage. He pointed out, for example, that during the 20th century three patriarchs of Venice had become Roman Pontiffs: Popes John Paul I, Blessed John XXIII, and St. Pius X.

Pope Benedict: Indifference to God leads to indifference to evil

An indifference to God leads to an indifference to evil. That was the message from Pope Benedict XVI at his April 20 Wednesday Audience in St. Peter’s Square, his last before Easter.


On the eve of Holy Thursday, the Pope dwelt upon Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane when the apostles slept as Jesus suffered the torment of his impending crucifixion.

Pope Benedict said of those moments, “It’s our very sleepiness to the presence of God that renders us insensitive to evil: we don’t hear God because we don’t want to be disturbed, and so we remain indifferent to evil.” He said that such a disposition leads to “a certain callousness of the soul towards the power of evil.”

The Pope was keen to stress that the rebuke of Christ to his slumbering apostles – “stay awake and keep vigil” – applies to the entire history of the Church. Jesus message, the Pope said, is a “permanent message for all time because the disciples’ sleepiness is not problem of that one moment, rather of the whole of history, ‘the sleepiness’ is ours, of those of us who do not want to see the full force of evil and do not want to enter into his Passion.”

The next three days are the most sacred in the Christian calendar. Those three days, known in Latin as the “Triduum,” observe the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ nearly 2000 years ago in Palestine. The Pope observed, “The liturgies of these days invite us to ponder the loving obedience of Christ who, having become like us in all things but sin, resisted temptation and freely surrendered himself to the Father’s will.”

The next major event on Pope Benedict’s calendar will be his “Chrism Mass” tomorrow morning in St. Peter’s Basilica. There, around 1,600 clergy from the Diocese of Rome and Roman colleges will renew their ordination promises.

From The Catholic News Agency

April 19, 2011: Pope Benedict elected pope

Pope Benedict praises non-canonized saints

From the Catholic News Agency

Pope Benedict XVI offered those gathered in St. Peter's Square a reflection on the “simple,” less well-known saints, as he brought his two-year stretch of teachings on the Church's saints to a close.

“In my life of faith, there are many saints, but not all of the guides on my path are great saints,” the Pope told the thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square for the April 13 general audience.

It’s estimated there are over 10,000 “canonized” Catholic saints – men and women who the Church declares to be in Heaven. But what of all those who are also in Heaven and have never been formally canonized? Well, it’s to such individuals that Pope Benedict turned his thoughts today.

“I look also to ‘simple’ saints, those good people I see in my life who will never be canonized, who are normal people, so to speak, without visible heroism, but in whose everyday goodness I see the truth of faith.”

Today’s address was the final installment in a series of meditations on the lives of the saints that the Pope delivered nearly every Wednesday for the past two years. Beneath the warmth of the noontide Roman sun, he urged all those present to seek holiness, describing it as “the fullness of Christian life, a life in Christ.”

Pope Benedict reminded his audience that, “(w)e are all called to saintliness: it is the very measure of Christian life." Achieving holiness, he concluded, requires opening ourselves "to the action of the Holy Spirit" so that we can become part of "the great mosaic of sainthood that God creates throughout history."

Video: 1951 Ordination of Pope Benedict to Priesthood!

Movie from the priestly ordination of 44 deacons on 29 June 1951 in the Freising Cathedral by his Eminence Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber. Among the 40 deacons there is Joseph Ratzinger and his brother Geaorg. You can clearly see the young and skinny Father Ratzinger at exactly 4:52-4:55 in the video.

Pope urges youth not to abandon God

The Catholic Review

Pope Benedict XVI urged young people not to abandon their faith in God because of the “attacks of evil” within the church.

“Carry intact the fire of your love in this church every time that men have obscured her face,” he said in a foreword to a new catechism edited specifically for young people.

The new “Youth Catechism,” also called “YouCat,” will be included in each pilgrim backpack for World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid.

The pope said he wanted to supplement the Catechism of the Catholic Church by translating it “into the language of young people and make its words penetrate their world.”

In the foreword, the pope urged everyone to study the catechism “with passion and perseverance” either alone, in study groups or in exchanges with others online.

Today’s Christians really need to understand their faith more than ever before in order to resist modern day challenges and temptations, he wrote.

“You have need of divine help if you do not want your faith to dry up as a dewdrop in the sun, if you do not want to succumb to the temptations of consumerism, if you do not want your love to be drowned in pornography, if you do not want to betray the weak and the victims of abuse and violence,” he wrote.

“You must know what you believe; you must know your faith with the same precision with which a specialist in information technology knows the (operating) system of a computer; you must know it as a musician knows his piece,” the foreword said.

While not specifically mentioning the clerical sex abuse crisis, the pope acknowledged the effect it has had on the faithful and said “the community of believers has been wounded in recent times by the attacks of evil” and sin in the heart of the church.

“Do not take this as a pretext to flee from God’s presence; you yourselves are the body of Christ, the church!” he told young people.

Pope Benedict: Church needs courageous apostles to fight indifference

From The Catholic News Agency

Pope Benedict said at his Wednesday general audience that the modern world needs “zealous” disciples of Christ, who will fight religious indifference with the “light and beauty” of the Gospel.

The Pope dedicated his teaching at the Vatican on March 23 to St. Lawrence of Brindisi, who was born in Italy in 1559 and was named one of the Doctors of the Church for his expertise in preaching Catholic doctrine and Sacred Scripture.

St. Lawrence is known for his “clear and tranquil” explanations of the Christian faith to his surrounding culture, the pontiff noted, particularly to those who had left the Church in the wake of the Reformation.

“Even today, the new evangelization needs well-trained, zealous and courageous apostles, so that the light and beauty of the Gospel may prevail over the cultural trends of ethical relativism and religious indifference,” he said. This effort will help transform the various ways people think about life and help them act with an “authentic Christian humanism.”

St. Lawrence, who lost his father at the age of seven, was entrusted by his mother to the care of the Franciscan Friars Minor Conventuals. He later entered the Order of Capuchins and was ordained a priest in 1582.

The saint acquired a deep knowledge of ancient and modern languages, which enabled him to “undertake an intense apostolate among various categories of people,” the Pope explained.

He was also an effective preacher, who was so well versed in the Bible and rabbinic literature “that rabbis themselves were amazed and showed him esteem and respect.”

“The success enjoyed by St. Lawrence helps us to understand that even today, as the hope-filled journey of ecumenical dialogue continues, the reference to Sacred Scripture, read in the Tradition of the Church, is an indispensable element of fundamental importance,” Pope Benedict said.

He added that even “the lowliest members of the faithful” benefited “from the convincing words of St. Lawrence, who addressed the humble in order to call everyone to live a life coherent with the faith they professed.”

The Pope then noted another prominent aspect of St. Lawrence's life, which was his tireless work to promote political and religious peace.

Popes and Catholic princes “repeatedly entrusted him with important diplomatic missions to placate controversies and favor harmony between European States, which at the time were threatened by the Ottoman Empire,” he said.

“Today, as in St. Lawrence's time, the world has great need of peace, it needs peace-loving and peace-building men and women,” Pope Benedict said. “Everyone who believes in God must always be a source of peace and work for peace.”

St. Lawrence was canonized in 1881 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1959 by Blessed John XXIII, who recognized not only the saint's personal sanctity, but his numerous contributions to biblical scholarship.

“St. Lawrence of Brindisi,” Pope Benedict said, “teaches us to love Sacred Scripture, to become increasingly familiar with it, daily to cultivate our relationship with the Lord in prayer, so that our every action, our every activity, finds its beginning and its fulfillment in Him.”

Pope Benedict to seminarians: God calls each person by name

From the Catholic News Agency

The life of the Christian is a response to God's call, Pope Benedict XVI told seminarians in Rome last week.

During his annual visit to the Diocese of Rome's major seminary on March 4, the Pope taught on the Christian call to vocation, humility, community and unity from St. Paul's writings.

A “coherent life” is not just the result of Baptism, but “the fruit of the will and a persevering commitment to collaborating with the gift, with the grace received," said the Pope.

One must pay a "personal price" and commit himself to follow Christ by sharing his Passion and Cross, he explained.

"Christian life begins with a call and is itself always a response, until the end," he told the seminarians.

Christians must meditate "again and again" on the mystery that God has called each person and that he knows them and awaits their response," he said.

That God was born into the world, suffered and died for man is a lesson in humility, explained the Pope. "We must always see ourselves in the light of God, so as to appreciate how great it is to be loved by Him and, at the same time, to see our own smallness, our poverty, and thus rightly comport ourselves not as masters but as servants."

God's call is also an "ecclesial call," he said. It is a call to community, united in "a single body" by the Holy Spirit.

"We also have to bear in mind how beautiful it is to be part of a company ... having friends in heaven and on earth, experiencing the beauty of this body, being happy that the Lord has called us into a single body and given us friends all over the world," he said.

“The unity of the Church," he concluded, "is the result of harmony, of a shared commitment to act like Jesus, by virtue of his spirit. ... In order to conserve unity of spirit, it is necessary to model our own behavior on the humility, sweetness and magnanimity which Jesus bore witness to in his Passion.”

The Pope said that the Holy Spirit is essential in uniting man to God's call.

He capped off the visit by joining the seminarians for dinner. They congratulated him for his 60-year anniversary of priestly ordination to be celebrated on June 29.

Pope Benedict: Sands of power and money

from The Catholic News Agency

On Christ, and not on the “sands of power, success and money,” does man find the true place to build his life, said Pope Benedict XVI at the Sunday Angelus.

From his studio windown high above St. Peter's Square, Pope Benedict spoke about the Sunday reading in which Jesus says that “only the one who does the will of my Father” will enter into heaven.

During the "Sermon on the Mount" described in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus explains that those who listen to his words and act on them are like a “wise man who built his house on rock.” Those who do not, he warns, are like the “fool” who builds his house on sand, only to have it collapse in a storm.

This conclusion, said the Pope, is an invitation to Jesus' disciples to listen to his words and put them in practice. Through this parable, Christ calls the disciple to a greater allegiance to his words.

“The invisible God out of the abundance of his love speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that he may invite and take them into fellowship with himself,” the Pope said, quoting from a Vatican II document.

“In this vision every man and woman appears as someone to whom the Word speaks, challenges and calls to enter this dialogue of love through a free response,” he said.

This means that people of every age who have had “the grace to know Jesus,” the “living word of God,” see in him “the true face of God,” said Pope Benedict.

And, at the same time, Jesus “makes us feel the joy of being the children of the father that is in heaven, indicating to us the solid base on which to build our lives.”

Still, the Pope observed, man often prefers to build his life on “the sands of power, success and money.”

He asked, “on what thing do we wish to build our lives? Who can truly respond to the restlessness of the human heart?”

Pope Benedict summed up the response in a single phrase: “Christ is the rock of our life!”

“He is the eternal and definitive word that is not scared by any type of adversity, difficulty or unease.”

He prayed that God's word would permeate the life, thoughts and actions of all.

The Pope concluded his pre-Angelus teaching by exhorting the faithful to “make space” for God's word daily, to feed themselves with it and contemplate it always. “It is a precious aid also for keeping oneself away from a superficial activism, that might satisfy pride for a moment, but that, in the end, leaves us empty and unsatisfied.”

As Mary did, “we wish to renew our 'yes' and entrust our path with confidence to God,” he said.

After the Marian prayer of the Angelus, Pope Benedict drew his attention to the March 2 murder of Pakistani minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti. He prayed that his “moving sacrifice ... might awaken in consciences the courage and the commitment to protect the religious liberty of all men and, likewise, to promoting their equal dignity.”

He also prayed for the victims of conflict in Libya. He ensured his closeness to them and all people who find themselves in “distressing situations.”

Pope Benedict's Lenten message...let go of selfishness

from The Catholic Free Press by Cindy Wooden

Lent is a time for self-examination and to let go of all traces of selfishness, which is the root of violence, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“The greed of possession leads to violence, exploitation and death,” which is why during Lent the church encourages almsgiving, “which is the capacity to share,” the pope said in his annual message for Lent.

The text of the pope’s message for Lent 2011, which begins March 9 for Latin-rite Catholics, was released at a Vatican news conference Tuesday.

Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, which promotes Catholic charitable giving, told reporters, “Intense misery leads to economic and political instability, creating a vacuum for conflict and unrest that produce a vicious circle of deepening hardship, especially for the most vulnerable.”

The cardinal said the pope’s message underscores the fact that “the encounter with Christ in his word and the sacraments manifests itself in concrete works of mercy.”

The theme of the pope’s message was taken from the Letter to the Colossians: “You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him.”

Pope Benedict said Lent is a special time for people either to prepare for baptism or to strengthen the commitment to following Christ originally made at baptism.

“The fact that in most cases baptism is received in infancy highlights how it is a gift of God: No one earns eternal life through their own efforts,” the pope said.

In his message, the pope took the year’s Lenten Sunday Gospels and used them to draw lessons he said would be helpful in making the Lenten journey toward Christian conversion.

The Gospel account of Jesus’ victory over temptation in the desert “is an invitation to become aware of our own fragility in order to accept the grace that frees from sin and infuses new strength,” he said.

The story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well is a reminder that all people, like the woman, desire the “water” of eternal life, he said. Only the water offered by Jesus “can irrigate the deserts of our restless and unsatisfied soul until it ‘finds rest in God,’” as St. Augustine said.

The Gospel account of Jesus healing the man born blind “is a sign that Christ wants not only to give us sight, but also to open our interior vision so that our faith may become ever deeper and we may recognize him as our only savior,” the pope said.

The story of the raising of Lazarus, read on the fifth Sunday of Lent, reminds Christians that their destiny is eternal life with God, who “created men and women for resurrection and life,” he said. 

The Lenten process of conversion, he said, is designed “to free our hearts every day from the burden of material things, from a self-centered relationship with the ‘world’ that impoverishes us and prevents us from being available and open to God and our neighbor.”

Through fasting, almsgiving and prayer, he said, “Lent teaches us how to live the love of Christ in an ever more radical way.”

Fasting helps people overcome selfishness and self-centeredness; almsgiving is a reminder of the sharing that should mark each day of a Christian’s life; and time dedicated to prayer is a reminder that time belongs to God and his desire is for people to spend eternity with him.