Saint Joseph Catholic Church

A Vatican diplomat called for the establishment of “safe and regular migration routes” to help deter human trafficking.

“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.”

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During the fourth and final session of the two-day extraordinary consistory (program), members of the College of Cardinals devoted their discussions to the topic of “The Path of Synod Implementation,” before an open conversation with Pope Leo.

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.

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During the third session of the two-day extraordinary consistory (program), which concludes today, members of the College of Cardinals discussed the topic, “Building the Good: The Worksites of Our Time.”

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”

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Following Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and prayer, the third session of the extraordinary consistory of the College of Cardinals (program) opened today with an address by Cardinal Stephen Brislin of Johannesburg, South Africa.

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.

Today is the Optional Memorial of St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria (376-444). Cyril was one of the metropolitan sees of the Christian Church in the east, was one of the great defenders of the faith against the heresy of Nestorius who denied the oneness of person in Jesus Christ. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, over which he presided in the pope's name, and at his instigation, it was defined that Christ, the Son of God, is at the same time God and man, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, His mother, is truly Theotokos, the Mother of God. St. Cyril died in 444. The Church venerates him as one of her great doctors. His commentary on the Gospel of St. John is one of the richest doctrinally of those left us by the Fathers of the Church.

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