The Cross.
CHURCH
<카자흐크스탄과 한국의 고대사 및 중세사(고려 후기 충선왕과 익제 이제현의 서방 순례기) 와, 초대 그리스도교 전교사 속에서
우리는 앞으로 연구할 사항이 적지 않다.>
Extraordinary Missionary Month - renewal for Church in Kazakhstan - 비정상적인 선교 1개월 - 카자흐크스탄 교회 쇄신.
In the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, where Catholics make up just 1 per cent of the population, the Church is experiencing a new life during the Extraordinary Missionary Month October. By Robin Gomes
소련의 공산주의 치하에서는 인구의 1 %내외만이 가톨릭이었으나, 10월 중 비상 선교 한달 동안 교회는 새로운 생활 체험을 하게 되었다.
The tiny Catholic community in Kazakhstan has made use of the Extraordinary Missionary Month October to renew its spirit and bear witness to Christ by serving the people and learning the country’s official language, says Father Leopold Kropfreiter.
The Austrian priest of the Servants of Jesus and Mary Congregation has been a missionary in the largest of the central Asian republic since 2008. Currently, he is serving the Archdiocese of Astana in the capital Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana),
Soviet legacy
Though a Muslim majority country, Kazakhstan’s Christian population saw a rise in the 19th century, with many Poles, Lithuanians, Belarussians, Ukrainians and Russians being deported to the Kazakh steppes under the Russian tsars.
Under the Soviet regime, atheism became the official ideology and doctrine of the state and the elimination of existing religion became its objective. This added a new wave of Christians to Kazakhstan with hundreds of thousands deported to the Soviet labour camps under Stalin in the 30s and 40s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a large number of deportees returned to their homes and countries and homes. At least four million people emigrated. Of these, 500 thousand were Catholics, according to Archbishop Tomasz Peta of Astana.
While the Christians population depleted, the Muslim population almost doubled during the last 30 years.
Today, over 70 per cent of the country’s some 18 million people professing Islam. Christians come next with over 26 per cent, mostly Russian Orthodox Christians. They are followed by Buddhists and others.
Catholics make up just 1 per cent of the country’s population, mostly of Polish, German and Lithuanian origins.
Missionary Month – new life
According to Fr Kropfreiter, the local Catholic community is now experiencing a new life, rediscovering the lives of the saints and the country’s cultural traditions, which the missionaries are called to learn if they want to speak to “hearts of the people". For this reason, he told AsiaNews, the Extraordinary Missionary Month is very important for the Church in the vast central Asian republic.
In the run-up to the Extraordinary Missionary Month, Fr. Kropfreiter said, the Church in Kazakhstan has been laying great emphasis on the four aspects that Pope Francis said should mark the month: a personal encounter with Jesus Christ in His Church, missionary testimony, missionary formation and missionary charity.
Speaking their language
The official languages of Kazakhstan are Kazakh and Russian, and traditionally Russian is still used as the liturgical language.
From the beginning of the World Missionary Month, Fr. Kropfreiter said, courses in Kazakh, which are obligatory for missionaries, were made available throughout the Archdiocese of Astana. According to him, it is a way to promote a more intensive dialogue and closer contact with the Kazakhs, whose population of around 12 million forms the great majority of Kazakhstan’s 18 million people. Catholics hope to reach the hearts of the people by speaking directly to them in their own language.
Saint Thérèse - a missionary model
One of the highlights of the World Missionary Month, Fr. Kropfreiter said, was the missionary pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus in Pavlodar, which is situated in the northeastern part of the country.
In 1927, Pope Pius XI declared St. Thérèse the co-patron of the missions along with Saint Francis Xavier.
Fr. Kropfreiter said the stops at Ekibastuz and Shalbakti provided a great opportunity to the pilgrims to come in contact with many missionaries and Catholics, whose life stories and testimonies proved to be a great inspiration.
The pilgrimage concluded with a Holy Mass celebrated by Archbishop Tomasz Peta of Astana. A colourful cultural event followed with Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians, Germans and Poles singing folk songs dressed in their traditional costumes. For Fr. Kropfreiter it was a demonstration of the Church’s universality and catholicity.
The next great task of the Catholics of Kazakhstan, the priest said, will be to invite people even with an Islamic background in a more open and courageous way to become more deeply acquainted with the Church of Christ.
The Kazakh Church
Under Soviet rule, Christians kept their faith alive, secretly gathering in their homes to pray. In the words of Archbishop Peta, “In the years of Soviet domination, when Catholics were forced to live without churches, priests and sacraments, Catholics created a sort of the "eighth sacrament": the Rosary. The only thing they could do during the Soviet persecution was to baptize their children and pray the Rosary. “In some ways, the Rosary replaced the lack of shepherds.”
In 1978, the government relaxed the rules and people began to profess their faith more openly. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Catholic Church in Kazakhstan was restored and Catholics felt free to worship publicly.
Pope Saint John Paul II established the Apostolic Administration of Kazakhstan on 13 April 1991, covering all of Central Asia. Diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Kazakhstan were established in 1994.
In 1997, the four “sui iuris” missions of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan were established.
In 1999, the Apostolic Administration of Kazakhstan was divided into three new Apostolic Administrations of Astana, Almaty and Atyrau and the Diocese of Karaganda.
The reborn Church of Kazakhstan received a much-needed boost with the visit of Pope John Paul II in September 2001. According to Archbishop Peta, the visit showed the world a living Church in Kazakhstan, with some 40 thousand people attending the Pope’s Mass.
“Without exaggerating, I can say that the papal visit opened a new chapter in the history of our Church. From that moment, every three years a Congress of religious representatives of all faiths is held in the capital.”
The Pope’s visit was also an occasion to raise the Marian sanctuary of Our Lady Queen of Peace, in the village of Ozyornoye, to the national shrine.
Youth meetings have been held since 1999 next to the tall cross on the hilltop in Ozyornoye. According to Archbishop Peta, they help to deepen the young people’s Christian faith and reflect on their future, on marriage and the family.
The Marian shrine, he said, reflects a strong character of the Church of Kazakhstan, namely, a strong Eucharistic adoration and a special devotion to the Virgin Mary.
The cross bears an inscription paying homage to the martyrs and victims of the Soviet repression. Today, Archbishop Peta said, “Kazakhstan is a blessed country, perhaps thanks to that blood and those tears of millions of martyrs.” He said the Church looks to the future with hope. (Source: AsiaNews)
26 October 2019, 21:54
*************************Programs Podcast /10:40 /Vatican & World news
Development of doctrine is a people that walks together
The Synod for the Amazon has provoked a lively debate among Catholics. There are some who fear going astray from the path of Tradition. The history of the Church shows the path of fidelity.
By Sergio Centofanti
Two thousand years of history teach us that the development of doctrine in the Church is a people that journeys together. Journeying through the ages, the Church sees and learns new things, always growing deeper in her understanding of the Faith. During this journey, there are sometimes people who stop along the way, others who run too quickly, and yet others who take a different path.
Benedict XVI: the Church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen
In this regard, the words of Benedict XVI – in a Letter written in 2009 on the occasion of the remission of the excommunication of the four bishops illicitly consecrated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X – are significant:
“The Church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962 – this must be quite clear to the Society. But some of those who put themselves forward as great defenders of the Council also need to be reminded that Vatican II embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church. Anyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries, and cannot sever the roots from which the tree draws its life".
Drawing together new things and old
Two elements must be considered: not freezing the Magisterium in a given age; and at the same time remaining faithful to Tradition. As Jesus says in the Gospel: “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt 13:52). We cannot simply cling to old things, nor can we simply welcome new things, separating them from the old.
Not stopping at the letter, but allowing oneself to be guided by the Spirit
It is necessary to understand when a development of doctrine is faithful to tradition. The history of the Church teaches us that it is necessary to follow the Spirit, rather than the strict letter. In fact, if one is looking for non-contradiction between texts and documents, they’re likely to hit a roadblock. The point of reference is not a written text, but the people who walk together. As we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“The Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book’. Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, ‘not a written and mute word, but incarnate and living’. If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, ‘open (our) minds to understand the Scriptures” (CCC, 108).
The great leap forward at the Council of Jerusalem, the first Council
If this spiritual and ecclesial viewpoint is lacking, every development will be seen as a demolition of doctrine and the building up of a new church. We should feel great admiration for the early Christians who took part in the Council of Jerusalem in the first century. Although they were Jews, they nonetheless abolished the centuries-old tradition of circumcision. It must have been very traumatic for some of them to make this leap. Fidelity, however, is not an attachment to a particular rule or regulation, but a way of “walking together” as the people of God.
Do unbaptized babies go to heaven?
Perhaps the most striking example concerns the salvation of unbaptized babies. Here we are talking about what is most important for believers: eternal salvation. In the Roman (“Tridentine”) Catechism, promulgated by Pope St Pius V in accord with a Decree of the Council of Trent, we read that no other possibility of gaining salvation is left to infants, if Baptism is not imparted to them (from the chapter, “On the Sacrament of Baptism”). And many people will remember what was said in the Catechism of Saint Pius X: “Where do babies who die without Baptism go? Babies who die without Baptism go to Limbo, where there is neither supernatural reward nor penalty; because, having original sin, and only that, they do not merit heaven; but neither do they deserve hell or purgatory”.
Development of doctrine from St Pius X to St John Paul II
The Catechism of the Council of Trent was published in 1566; that of St Pius X, in 1912. But the Catechism of the Catholic Church, produced under the direction of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and approved in 1992 by Pope St John Paul II, says something different:
“As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God… Indeed, the great mercy of God ‘Who desires that all men should be saved’ (1 Tim 2:4), and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused Him to say: ‘Let the children come to Me, do not hinder them’ (Mk 10:4), allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism” (CCC, 1261).
So the solution was already in the Gospel, but we did not see it for many centuries.
The question of women in the history of the Church
The Church has made a great deal of progress on the question of women. The growing awareness of the rights and dignity of women was greeted by Pope John XXIII as a sign of the times. In the First Letter to Timothy, St Paul wrote, “Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men” (v. 11-12). It was only in 1970’s, during the pontificate of St Paul VI, that women began to teach future priests in the pontifical universities. Yet even here, we had forgotten that it was a woman, St Mary Magdalene, who first proclaimed the Resurrection of Jesus to the Apostles.
The truth will set you free
A final example is the recognition of freedom of religion and of conscience, as well as freedom in politics and freedom of expression, by the Magisterium of the post-Conciliar Church. It is a real leap forward from the documents of 19th century popes such as Gregory XVI, who, in the encyclical Mirari vos, defined these principles as “most poisonous errors”. Looking at this text from a literal point of view, there seems to be a great contradiction, rather than a linear development. But if we read the Gospel more closely, we recall the words of Jesus: “If you continue in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:31-32).
The sorrow of the Popes
The saints have always invited us to love the Popes, as a condition for walking together in the Church. Speaking to the priests of the Apostolic Union in 1912, Pope St Pius X, with “the outpouring of a sorrowful heart”, said, “It seems incredible, and even painful, that there should be priests to whom this recommendation must be made, but in our days we are unfortunately in this harsh, unhappy condition of having to say to priests: Love the Pope!”
Pope St John Paul II, in the Apostolic Letter Ecclesia Dei, noting “with great affliction” the illegitimate episcopal ordinations conferred by Archbishop Lefebvre, recalled that “a notion of Tradition which opposes the universal Magisterium of the Church possessed by the Bishop of Rome and the Body of Bishops” is “especially contradictory”. He continued, “It is impossible to remain faithful to the Tradition while breaking the ecclesial bond with him to whom, in the person of the Apostle Peter, Christ Himself entrusted the ministry of unity in His Church”.
And Benedict XVI, in a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church concerning the Remission of the Excommunication of the Four Bishops Consecrated Archbishop Lefebvre” expressed the same sorrow: “I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility”.
Catholics should not only never be lacking in respect toward the Pope, but should love him as the Vicar of Christ.
Appeal to unity: Walking together toward Christ
Fidelity to Jesus does not, therefore, mean being fixated on some text written at a given time in these two thousand years of history; rather, it is fidelity to His people, the people of God walking together toward Christ, united with His Vicar and with the Successors of the Apostles. As Pope Francis said at the Angelus on Sunday, at the conclusion of the Synod:
“What was the Synod? It was, as the word says, a journey undertaken together, comforted by the courage and consolations that come from the Lord. We walked, looking each other in the eye and listening to each other, sincerely, without concealing difficulties, experiencing the beauty of moving forward together in order serve”.
VATICAN
Pope appoints Jesuit priest as Prefect of Secretariat for Economy
Pope Francis has chosen a Jesuit priest to head the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy. Father Juan Antonio Guerrero, SJ is scheduled to take office in January 2020.
The Holy Father has appointed Father Juan Antonio Guerrero as the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy of the Holy See.
Currently, the 60-year-old Jesuit, Father Juan Antonio Guerrero, is the Father General’s Delegate for Interprovincial Roman Houses and Works. He is also a General Councillor.
"As a Jesuit, it is a joy to receive a mission directly from the Pope. It is a privileged way to realize my vocation," said Father Guerrero. "The obedience I profess has always led me along unexpected paths, led me where I would never have dared to venture. And so, I am grateful. Obedience is, for me, a privileged place of encounter with the Lord.”
As the Father General’s Delegate for the Interprovincial Roman Houses and Works, Father Guerrero is the Major Superior of three hundred and sixty Jesuits. They come from sixty-nine Jesuit Provinces around the world. One hundred and fifty are in formation, and the other two hundred and ten carry out their mission at The Pontifical Gregorian University, The Pontifical Biblical Institute, The Pontifical Oriental Institute, the Vatican Observatory, Civiltá Cattolica, Centro Aletti, the Russian College, the Bellarmino College, the Gesù College, the Communication Dicastery (Vatican Radio), and a number of other departments of the Holy See. Father Guerrero has been working on the project to integrate the three academic institutions in Rome (the Gregorian, Biblicum and Orientale) entrusted to the Jesuits by the Holy See. He leaves this project while it is still in process.
He has also been involved in other governance missions: in addition to his current ones, he was the Provincial of the Jesuit Province of Castille, with over six hundred Jesuits, overseeing a good number of works. It was his responsibility to allocate scarce resources, always keeping gospel values in mind, and he contributed to the process of integrating and reorganizing the Jesuit provinces in Spain.
“’Surprise’ was the word that came to mind when I was called from Mozambique to Rome to be the Delegate of the Father General. For this new service, I have to look for another word, because it was in no way anything that I imagined for myself, even as a possibility. This call was something completely unexpected. Initially, it filled me with anxiety, and I felt quite numb. But I welcome it with humility, with confidence in the Lord and in the team that is already working in the Secretariat for the Economy. I will collaborate in the service of this mission by offering the best of myself."
Father Guerrero was born in Mérida, Spain (1959). He studied with the Salesians and the Jesuits. While at university, he lived in a Claretian college. He joined the Society of Jesus when he was twenty years old. He studied in Spain, Brazil, France and the United States. He graduated in Economics (1986), Philosophy (1993) and Theology (1994). Between 1994 and 2003, he was Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the Pontifical University Comillas. He discontinued working on his doctorate when he was appointed the novice master for Spain. He served in this mission for five years, after which, in 2008, he was appointed as Provincial of the Province of Castile in Spain. Six years later, in 2014, he was sent to Mozambique, where he worked as an economist and project coordinator. There, he was also involved in the ministry of the spiritual exercises, taught philosophy, and helped build a school, of which he was also the principal.
In 2017, before completing his third year in Mozambique, Father Guerrero was called to Rome for the missions he currently carries out: those of being a General Councillor and the Father General’s Delegate for Roman Houses and Works entrusted to the Society by the Holy See.
Guerrero speaks Italian, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
"Personally, it seems that everything always changes in my life, but in reality almost nothing changes. In the end, we always do the same, the "one thing:” trying to be with the Lord, thanking Him so much for the blessings received, and putting all that we are and have at His service and that of His Church. Obviously, I come to this task from outside the Vatican Curia, and I will be entering a new world. I will need some time to adapt and to learn, to get to know and familiarize myself with the people, with the procedures, with the relationships between the various departments, etc. I will need some time to learn to know you. I am willing to dedicate myself fully to the task that has been entrusted to me.”
Fr Sosa, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, expressed the joy of the Society of Jesus in its availability for service to the Holy Father and the Holy See. "When the request of the Holy Father came to me, I welcomed it with openness and availability." Father Sosa asked His Holiness that this appointment not be associated with the episcopate, so that Father Guerrero could return, after finishing his mission, to his normal life as a Jesuit.
"I thank the Holy Father for allowing me to carry out this mission as a Jesuit, so that I can continue to remain a Jesuit when this service ends," says Father Juan Antonio Guerrero.
“In approaching this task, it helps me to realize that, as a member of the Body of Christ, other people, also members, have dedicated themselves to build up communities spiritually and in faith. They are often present in the divisions and wounds of humanity, trying to build bridges and to offer healing. They collaborate more explicitly and visibly in that Mission of Christ, in which we are all partners.
My desire is to get to know and to begin to work with the team at the Holy See's Secretariat for the Economy. I wish to become familiar with the criteria which the Council for the Economy established, and to collaborate in realizing what His Holiness desires for this Dicastery. I hope to contribute to the economic transparency of the Holy See, and to help to use efficiently the goods and resources that are at the service of the important evangelizing mission of the Church ."
Father Guerrero will take office in January 2020.
