Saint Joseph Catholic Church

An Italian journalist reported today that Cardinal Gerhard Müller “shook up” the extraordinary consistory of the College of Cardinals by calling for a formal response to the Society of Saint Pius X’s latest statements ahead of its scheduled episcopal consecrations.

“I offer the prayers and solidarity of the Church in the United States to our sisters and brothers affected by this tragedy,” said Bishop A. Elias Zaidan, the Maronite bishop of Los Angeles. “Let us all join in prayer that Our Lady of Coromoto, patroness of Venezuela, will comfort and protect her children and that compassionate international assistance will arrive swiftly.”

“Human trafficking is a contemporary form of slavery and a grave violation of the God-given human dignity,” Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, apostolic nuncio and Permanent Observer to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, Switzerland, said during a June 22 meeting with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons.

“My Delegation wishes to emphasize the importance of prevention, protection, liberation, and rehabilitation,” Archbishop Balestrero added. “In this context, the role of the family is vital, particularly through family reunification and guardianship for unaccompanied children.”

Vatican News’s summary of the confidential deliberations hinted that some of the cardinals are tiring of synodal meetings: the agency reported that “the cardinals addressed the risk that the complexity of consultation could weigh down the Church at a time when it is called to give its witness.”

“Some of the themes that emerged included deepening the ascetical and historical dimensions of synodality, while offering the faithful an image of the priesthood that is both evangelical and non-clerical,” the summary added.

According to the Vatican News’s summary of the confidential deliberations, “the antidote to individualism and to fractures, many groups agreed, is the Gospel: a Church that offers a sense of belonging, that is able to soothe the wounds of our time, and that is renewed while avoiding forms of integralism and polarization; a Church that makes visible its Samaritan face, with Christians who are not spectators of social ruin, but wise architects who rebuild the city of all.”

According to the summary, the cardinals also discussed the following topics, among others:

• “the deep fractures of our time: among peoples and nations, within societies, and within families themselves; and on how these generate wounds, especially among the poorest, the weakest, young people who lack a sense of newness, and adults lacking the wisdom of years”
• “the danger posed by a lack of meaning, meaningful relationships, and identity, which pushes people toward a tribal attitude”
• “the call to give names to living beings, and not to reduce them to numbers and statistics; to experience and accept the human sense of limits, which AI tends to deny; and to defend the dignity of work”
• the common good, with its “its origin in faith: faith in God and in the transcendent dimension present in every person, which leads human beings to go beyond every frontier, beginning with the one that takes them beyond themselves; to live solidarity with the poor as a response to individualism; to live catholicity fully; to build gratuitous relationships, not institutions, at every level; and to seek a language capable of engaging with settings distant from the Christian faith”

Reflecting on Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, Cardinal Brislin said that for believers, contributing to the common good “takes on the form of synodality.”

“Cardinal Brislin described synodality as the concrete trace of the communion from which the Church is born and grows, enabling Christians to enter the building site of history without fear,” Vatican News reported in its summary of the prelate’s remarks.