Responding to a letter from the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and assessment from the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, a spokesman for the German bishops said that the assessment “deals with the draft version of the Statutes as of June 2019 and does not yet take into account the version updated in July and after the meeting of the Permanent Council in August, which no longer contains some passages to which the assessment refers.”

“The Church that the Lord wants, as Pope Benedict XVI said, does not grow by proselytism, it grows by attraction, that is, the attraction of witness, and behind witness there is always the Holy Spirit.,” Pope Francis told members of the Italian community, which was founded in 1989. “This is a methodology that we are called to live in the work of evangelization. We need to walk together with the people of our time, to listen to what they carry in their hearts, to offer them, with our lives, the most credible response, that is, the one that comes from God, through Jesus Christ ... First with witness; then they will ask you, ‘But why are you like this?’, and then it will be the moment to speak.”

“We sincerely appreciate this gift, which is the manifestation of spontaneity, a sign of the true fraternal love that today unites Catholics and Orthodox,” Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said of Pope Francis’s gift of nine fragments of St. Peter’s bones.

Catholic communion protects a particular identity “from the temptation of closing in on itself and falling into national or ethnic particularisms that exclude others,” Pope Francis told Europe’s Eastern Catholic bishops on September 14. “And this is a danger of the present time in our civilization: particularisms that become populisms and seek to dictate and make everything uniform.”

“Life imprisonment is not the solution to problems, but a problem to be solved,” Pope Francis said in a September 14 audience with Italy’s Prison and Juvenile and Community Justice Administration (video). “Because if hope is locked up, there is no future for society. Never deprive anyone of the right to start over!” In 2015, Pope Francis compared life imprisonment to “hidden death sentences.”

Today the Church commemorates two friends in the service of Christ and his Church. Cornelius, a Roman, was the twenty-first Pope during the reign of the Emperor Gallus and Volusian. He had to oppose Novatian, the first anti-pope, who believed that apostates who repented could not be forgiven. Helped by St. Cyprian, Cornelius confirmed his papal authority. He was beheaded in exile at Civitavecchia, Italy in 253. Saints Cyprian and Cornelius are mentioned in the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I) of the Mass.

Pope Francis met on September 16 with President George Vella of Malta. Their conversation focused on migration and environmental issues as well as Church-state relations.

Globalization has both good and bad aspects, Pope Francis remarked in a September 16 talk with representatives of Italy’s RAI broadcasters. The positive aspect is the globalization unites people, he said. The negative aspect is that it “mortifies the richness and particularity of each people, it tends to make everything and everyone the same.”

Meeting with leaders of the Eastern Catholic churches, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that the Eastern churches in communion with Rome are an aid to ecumenical dialogue, not an impediment. He said that the Eastern churches deserve special care. “Almost all of them are in the territory of geopolitical tensions,” he observed.

This is such beautiful advice! In a recent Ascension Presents video, Jackie Francois interviews Overcome ministry founder Kim Zember, who also struggles with same-sex

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