World Sunday of Mission.
The Conclusion of the Catholic Synod of the Family.
The synod was attended by about 200 bishops
Announcement of the Beatification of Pope Paul VI.
Pope Paul VI bestows the Ring on the newly
created Cardinal Wojtyla June 1967
created Cardinal Wojtyla June 1967
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| Mosaic showing Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem, Jan 1964. |
19th October 2014
SUNDAYS IN ORDINARY TIME
DAY BY
DAY.
Courtesy of MAGNIFICAT.com
Graces of Mission Sunday
By Blessed Paul VI
It is appropriate first of all to emphasise the following point:
for the Church, the first means of evangelisation is the witness of an authentically
Christian life, given over to God in a communion that nothing should destroy and at the same time given to one's neighbour with limitless zeal. As we said recently
to a group of lay people, "Modem man listens more willingly to witnesses
than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are
witnesses." Saint Peter expressed this well when he held up the example of
a reverent and chaste life that wins over even without a word those who refuse
to obey the Word. It is therefore primarily by her conduct and by her life that
the Church will evangelise the world, in other words, by her living witness of
fidelity to the Lord Jesus-the witness of poverty and detachment, of freedom in
the face of the powers of this world, in short, the witness of sanctity.
What is the state of the Church ten years after the Council? ..
Is she firmly established in the midst of the world and yet free and
independent enough to call for the world's attention? Does she testify to
solidarity with people and at the same time to the divine Absolute? Is she more
ardent in contemplation and adoration and more zealous in missionary,
charitable, and liberating action? Is she ever more committed to the effort to
search for the restoration of the complete unity of Christians, a unity that
makes more effective the common witness, "so that the world may believe"?
We are all responsible for the answers that could be given to these questions.
BLESSED PAUL VI (+ 1978) reigned as pope from 1963 to 1978.
Paul VI (Bessed)
From Apostolic Exhortation of His Holinesss Pope Paul VI to the Episcopate, the Clergy and to all the faithful of the entire world. 1st Paragraph #41, 2nd Paragraph #76.
Used with permission of the Librcriu Edltrice vatlcana.
Thomas Stransky
The historic meeting of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras
Mosaic showing Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem.
The dates of Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to the Holy Land are no accident. Pope Francis intends to visit from May 24 to 26, primarily to commemorate with Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople the 50th anniversary of the meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem in January 1964.
Narratives of that first encounter presupposed that the primary purpose of Pope Paul’s pilgrimage was to provide an occasion for meeting the ecumenical patriarch. The editors of America, for example, wrote on Jan. 18, 1964, that they felt “the ultimate objective of Pope Paul in going to the Holy Land was precisely the chance this offered for such a dramatic confrontation.”
Not so.
Two weeks before the new pope opened the second period of the Second Vatican Council on Sept. 29, 1963, he wrote an appunto, a private memorandum to himself, in which he expressed the hope to be a “papal pilgrim in the Holy Land.” One subordinate purpose was for him to have “a fraternal encounter with the various Christian denominations there.” In his address to the council on Dec. 4, 1963, however, this reason was absent when he shared his decision to make a “pious pilgrimage to the homeland of Jesus our Savior” in January. For some reason, he and his tight-lipped planning committee of five had not envisioned ecumenical meetings. Their sole preoccupation, it seems, was to visit Catholic communities at holy sites in Israel and in Jordanian East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and to negotiate with the two warring countries that were at each other’s throats.
The pilgrimage had been the best kept secret in the Roman Curia, which has a reputation for being leaky. It was a complete surprise to Cardinal Augustin Bea, Msgr. Johannes Willebrands and people on their staff in the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, like Pierre Duprey of the Society of Missionaries of Africa, who until April 1963 had been the rector of the Melkite Saint Anne’s Seminary in Jerusalem, where he was quite familiar with the Christian leaders and their sensitive interchurch protocols for visiting heads of churches. Father Duprey quickly foresaw the possibility of Paul VI’s meeting with the Greek and Armenian patriarchs in Jerusalem, Benediktos I and Yeghishe Derderian. If the Holy See would not even propose the possibility to them, one could face an interchurch setback by a papal snub, a lack of courtesy no matter how unintentional.
