A practical first step towards holiness is to pray for your enemies, Pope Francis has said.
During a parish visit on Saturday evening, the Pope was asked: “What is the journey needed to become holy?” Francis replied: “Are you merciful towards the people who have harmed you or don’t like you? If God is merciful, if he is holy, if he is perfect, then we must be merciful, holy and perfect as he is. This is holiness. A man or woman who does this deserves to be canonised.” The Pope made the remarks during a parish visit on Saturday evening.
“I suggest you start small,” Pope Francis told parishioners at St Mary Josefa, Rome. “We all have enemies. We all know that so-and-so speaks ill of us. And we all know that this person or that person hates us.”
When that happens, the Pope said, “I suggest you take a minute, look at God : ‘This person is your son or your daughter, change his or her heart, bless him or her.’ This is praying for those who don’t like us, for our enemies. Perhaps the rancour will remain in us, but we are making an effort to follow the path of this God who is so good, merciful, holy, perfect, who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good.”
The Pope said that if everyone learned forgiveness, there would be no wars.
“These big wars we read about in the papers and see on the news, these massacres of people, of children, how much hatred! It’s the same hatred you have in your heart for this person, that person, that relative, your mother-in-law. It’s bigger, but it’s the same hatred.”
The Pope said prayer was “an antidote for hatred”, including the hatred in familes, for instance over an inheritance.
“Prayer is powerful. Prayer defeats evil. Prayer brings peace,” the Pope said.
US priest to Donald Trump: give my citizenship to a refugee
A vietnamese-born priest has offered to give up his US citizenship, so that someone from one of the countries Donald Trump listed in his travel ban can be accepted into the US.Fr Chuong Hoai Nguyen, a Salesian in California, came to America as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” refugees following South Vietnam’ collapse in 1975. He has since become a citizen.
His offer came in an open letter to Trump on January 27, the same day the president issued an executive order that suspended the entire US refugee resettlement programme. The order has been held up in court.
“Becoming a refugee is a choice one makes when there are no other options,” said Fr Nguyen in his letter, adding that when he heard of the order, “my heart and my soul were frozen”.
Fr Nguyen described his own experience in an overcrowded boat with “no captain and no crew; my father, brothers, and many others became seamen on that week-long trip with little food or water,” he wrote. “We were fortunate. We survived – unlike the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 refugees who died at sea.”
Bishops: 2.4m Kenyans at risk
The Kenyan government has declared the country’s drought a national disaster, three days after Catholic bishops requested such an action.The bishops appealed for food relief earlier this month in an effort to get help from other countries. They said that up to 2.4 million Kenyans were in dire need of food and reported “tales of suffering, desperation, hopelessness and in some cases, imminent loss of life.”
