Italy announced this week that it would close airspace over Rome to drones for the duration of the upcoming Catholic jubilee year, which is expected to bring more than a million extra visitors to the Italian capital.
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At the same time, the Catholic climate movement has had strong support from other corners of the American church, Leano said.
Pope Francis said Germany’s bishops should be inspired by the biblical couple of Priscilla and Aquila, who travelled with St Paul and strengthened the early Church.
Pope Francis praised the German churches and individual German citizens who are doing so much to help the hundreds of thousands of people “seeking refuge from war and from persecution”, particularly in Syria and Iraq.
Using God’s name to try to justify violence and murder is “blasphemy”, Pope Francis said November 15, speaking about the terrorist attacks on Paris.
“Hard to avoid the conclusion that Pope Francis just effectively rewrote the Catechism, and destroyed a Eucharistic discipline that has existed since the Reformation”, wrote the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, another convert to Catholicism who later left for the Orthodox Church.
The Pope directed his reflections to those gathered in the Vatican’s Saint Martha guesthouse for his daily Mass. He focused on the day’s Gospel reading from Luke, in which Jesus looks at Jerusalem from a nearby hill and weeps, because the way of peace “is hidden” from their eyes. “We can, however, be inspired the by life of the first Christians”.
“Such barbarity leaves us stunned and makes us question how the heart of man could come up with and carry out such horrific acts, which have shattered not only France, but the whole world”, the pope said.
He added: “The Church is the caretaker of God’s house, not its owner”.
Holy doors around the world represent the “great door of God’s mercy” and are generously opened to receive people’s repentance and offer the grace of God’s forgiveness, he said. “The gatekeeper does not choose the sheep, the parish secretary doesn’t choose them”, the pope said.
“Let us build weapons, so that the economy will right itself somewhat, and let us go forward in pursuit of our interests”, he said, imitating what those people might say. If there is no priest, there is no Eucharist. “The Church must never tire of being an advocate for life and must not take steps back in her announcement that human life is to be protected unconditionally from the moment of conception until natural death”.
The country has been wracked by months of violence between Christians and Muslims.
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Corruption is always a danger within the Church, the Pope said, and instead of devotion to the faith, she becomes “dominated by money and power”.
