Pope Francis has celebrated a jubilee Mass for prisoners and called on governments to consider granting some prisoners early release.
At his Sunday Angelus address, the Pope called for “an act of clemency toward those imprisoned who are considered eligible to benefit from this measure”. He also said civil authorities should work to improve living conditions for those serving time “so that the human dignity of prisoners may be fully respected.”
The previous day, Francis celebrated a Mass attended by 1,000 current and former prisoners from 12 countries, as well as priests, men and women religious, and laypeople who work in prison ministry.
Detainees from several prisons in Italy and Spain were given special permission to attend the Mass for the Year of Mercy. Inmates from Italian prisons assisted as altar servers, while a choir composed of prisoners and volunteers from the Dozza prison in Bologna provided the music for the celebration.
In his homily, the Pope reflected on the Sunday readings, which he said acknowledged “God as the source” of hope.
“Hope is a gift of God. We must ask for it,” he told the current and former inmates.
“It is placed deep within each human heart in order to shed light on this life, so often troubled and clouded by so many situations that bring sadness and pain.”
Departing from his prepared text, the Pope said: “Every time I visit a prison, I ask myself: ‘Why them and not me?’ We can all make mistakes; all of us. And in one way or another, we have made mistakes.”
Dutch cardinal calls for encyclical on gender theory
The spread of gender theory is misleading so many Catholics that a high-level document may be required to correct the errors of the ideology, a Dutch cardinal has said.
Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht said a papal encyclical or other magisterial document “might appear to be necessary” to counter the spread of the new theory that gender can be determined by choice rather than by biology.
He said that even Catholic parents were beginning to accept that their own children can choose their genders partly because “they don’t hear anything else”.
The Church, he said, now had an urgent duty to remind them of the truth of its teaching about the human body. “Perhaps a document only on this problem might be an urgent question,” Cardinal Eijk said.
“It [gender theory] is spreading everywhere in the Western world, and we have to warn people,” he said.
“From the point of moral theology, it’s clear – you are not allowed to change your sex in this way.”
The cardinal’s remarks came ahead of the Anscombe Memorial Lecture, which he was scheduled to give at Blackfriars in Oxford on the theme: “Is Medicine Losing its Way?”
Ancient crucifix saved from ruin
A wooden sculpture of a crucified Christ that survived the Sack of Rome and 700 years of termites is due to be unveiled after being restored in St Peter’s Basilica.
The 14th-century wooden crucifix, with an arm-span of more than six foot, had languished behind a lift shaft in a closed chapel before the restoration project began. It was shown to the public for the first time during Pope Francis’s Jubilee for Prisoners as “a beautiful sign of hope”.
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