Pope Francis has approved new Vatican rules to make sainthood Causes more financially transparent. Under the new regulations, which have been approved for a three-year trial period, promoters of Causes may have the option of appealing to the Vatican for help with funding.
“In cases in which there are real difficulties to sustain the cost of a Cause in the Roman phase, the promoters may ask the Congregation for the Causes of Saints for a contribution through the local bishop,” the regulations state. The rules also say that the congregation will have to take disciplinary action if there is “failure or administrative – financial abuses by those participating in the development of the Cause”.
The new regulations outline procedures for handling contributions received and specifies which authorities are charged with overseeing the flow of money for a Cause. While the postulator or promoter of a Cause can continue to administer the funds for each one, the bishop of the diocese, the superior general of the religious order that initiates the Cause or another Church authority must review financial statements and approve the budgets.
The reform comes after the leak of documents allegedly written by a commission studying the financial activity of Vatican offices, which concluded that there was “insufficient oversight of the cash-flow for canonisations”. The Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, one of two journalists standing trial at the Vatican, has claimed that the average cost of a Cause is about €500,000, or £380,000.
Francis to visit Auschwitz during trip to Poland in July
Pope francis will visit Auschwitz during his July 27-31 visit to Poland for World Youth Day, the Polish bishops have announced. Up to 2.5 million young people from around the world, as well as 20,000 priests and 1,200 bishops, are expected at the gathering in Kraków, which is less than 50 miles from the site of the Nazi death camp.
While the Vatican confirmed the dates of Pope Francis’s trip to Poland, it released no details of the itinerary. Announcing a preliminary schedule, the Polish bishops’ conference said Pope Francis’s visit to Auschwitz would include prayers at the camp’s “Death Wall” where prisoners were executed. The Pope will also make a visit to the nearby cell of St Maximilian Kolbe, who in 1941 gave his life to save another prisoner, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had a wife and children. The Pope is expected to address Jewish and other faith representatives and camp survivors at the Holocaust memorial.
The visit, which follows those by St John Paul II in 1979 and Benedict XVI in 2006, will fall on the presumed anniversary of the decision by Conventual Franciscan Fr Kolbe to sacrifice himself.
Christians are genocide victims, says US House
The US House of Representatives has voted that atrocities carried out by ISIS in Syria and Iraq should be called “genocide,” and has called for the establishment of a Syrian war crimes tribunal under United Nations authority.
The House unanimously voted 383-0 in favour of a non-binding resolution urging President Barack Obama’s administration to call attacks against Christians, Yazidis and other minorities “war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”
The vote came ahead of a congressionally mandated deadline of March 17 for Secretary of State John Kerry to decide on whether to make such a declaration, which would increase the likelihood of US action to defend Christians.
State Department officials hinted last October that a genocide designation was coming for the Yazidi minority in the region, but not for Christians. Protests from Christian groups resulted in congressional action setting the March 17 deadline.
Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has asked American Catholics to sign a petition calling for the US administration to make the declaration of genocide.
The petition is sponsored by the Knights of Columbus and In Defense of Christians, who together released a report arguing that ISIS’s crimes reach the level set out by the Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The report, Genocide Against Christians in the Middle East, lists 1,131 Iraqi Christians killed between 2003 and 2014, and documents hundreds of attacks on Christians and churches.
Bishops issue frank self-criticism
catholic bishops in India have criticised their Church for “excessive preoccupation with institutionalisation, insufficient zeal and fear of proclaiming Christ as the unique Saviour … and growing indifference to and lack of commitment to the Christian vocation”. The statement came at the end of a plenary assembly. “Within the Church, we feel the need to renew ourselves, including the bishops,” Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal said at a press conference.
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