Saint Joseph Catholic Church

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Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State of His Holiness, celebrated Mass on December 13 for participants in the Jubilee of Italian Diplomacy, days after his visit to an Islamist insurgency hotspot in Mozambique.

Cardinal Parolin spoke of a “tragic reality” of killing, “often by decapitation”—a tragedy that has “a fundamentally religious root” and is “almost completely ignored at the international level.”

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, delivered an address on December 12 entitled “The Mother of Evangelization: Why is Mary the first evangelizer?”

Addressing Latin American priests, religious, and seminarians studying in Rome, Cardinal Fernández offered what he described as “an extremely important, key clarification for a healthy Mariology”:

It is not that God is distant and Mary gives us that closeness that God does not have. Please don’t say this. It is quite the opposite: it is impossible for Mary to be closer to us than the Father, than Christ, than the Holy Spirit [are]. No way.

What happens is that in her, in her face as a Mother, we can easily discover the closeness of God who is the one who reaches the deep intimacy of our heart. In her we recognize that love of the Father of which the Gospel speaks to us, the love of the Father, the tenderness of Christ and the power of the Spirit that we read in the texts of the Gospel.

A record 12.8 million pilgrims visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City for the December 12 feast day of the Patroness of the Americas.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke with Pope Leo by phone on the feast day and renewed her invitation to the Pontiff to visit Mexico.

The Vatican newspaper devoted the most prominent front-page coverage in its December 13 edition to the plight of migrants who have left the island nation of Tuvalu for Australia because of rising ocean levels.

“The first climate migrants have arrived in Australia,” Giada Aquilino reported. “They are about 300 inhabitants” of Tuvalu, “long threatened by rising ocean levels caused by the devastating effects of climate change.”

Addressing pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for yesterday’s Sunday Angelus address, Pope Leo reflected on the Gospel reading at Mass (Matthew 11:2-11) and said that Christ “opens the eyes of man to the glory of God.”

Christ “gives voice to the oppressed and to those whose voices have been silenced by violence and hatred,” Pope Leo said. “He defeats ideologies that make us deaf to the truth. He heals the ailments that deform the body.”

The Pope concluded, “Let us rejoice, since Jesus is our hope, especially in times of trial, when life seems to lose meaning and everything appears darker, words fail us, and we struggle to understand others. May the Virgin Mary, model of expectant hope, attentiveness, and joy, help us to imitate the work of her Son by sharing bread and the Gospel with the poor.”

The Vatican Publishing House has published We Believe in One God: Sixty years of Methodists and Catholics walking together, a work compiled by the Methodist-Roman Catholic International Commission.

“Our Commission has confirmed that the consensus between Methodists and Catholics about the foundation of faith and the source of our salvation far outweighs our remaining differences on matters relating to the means of saving grace in the life and practice of our respective communions—although here, too, we have made great advances toward mutual understanding and agreement,” said the dialogue’s co-chairmen, Archbishop Shane Mackinlay of Brisbane and Edgardo Colón-Emeric, dean of Duke Divinity School.

Founded by John Wesley in the 18th century, Methodism was originally a movement within the Church of England. There are 40.5 million Methodists in 138 countries, according to the World Methodist Council.