Pope urges charity when churches are sold, reused
ROME—The Vatican and bishops from Europe and beyond have developed proposed guidelines for the sale or reuse of Catholic churches to help ensure that they retain their cultural heritage and serve the good of the community, not commerce.
With some churches being turned into discos, gelaterias or demolished outright, the guidelines suggest that if the church cannot be given to another Christian community, it should be reused for cultural or societal aims. Those would include being used as a museum, a library or conference hall, a food bank for the poor or charity center.
The guidelines were being finalized at a Vatican-backed conference Thursday that was intentionally provocative in its title: “Doesn’t God dwell here anymore?”
In a message read out at the start of the conference, Pope Francis urged delegates to remember that churches and the religious art inside them “are witness to the faith of the community.” Any decision about their future uses should consider the needs of the poor and be taken “in dialogue” with the community, he said.
Francis said the fact that churches today are no longer necessary “should be welcomed in the church not with anxiety, but as a sign of the times that invites us to reflection and requires us to adapt.” The conference aimed to do just that by providing case studies of how dioceses handled particular cases disposing of aging, expensive assets, and developing guidelines for bishops going forward.
Monsignor Pawel Malecha, a top canon lawyer at the Vatican high court, cited German statistics that found more than 500 German churches had been closed from 2000-2017, with a third of them demolished and the rest sold or destined for other uses. Catholics in the Netherlands, meanwhile, estimate that two-thirds of their 1,600 churches will be closed down within the next 10 years, he said.
Nuns renounce vows after power struggle
VATICAN CITY— Nearly all the members of a French religious order of nuns have decided to renounce their vows rather than live under a Vatican commissioner appointed after a dispute with the local bishop.
The Vatican last year suspended the government of the Little Sisters of Marie, Mother of the Redeemer and removed the superior and novice mistress following an investigation apparently sparked by a dispute over the future of homes for the elderly in southern France where the sisters minister.
The Little Sisters complained that the commissioner the Vatican named to run the order knew nothing of their way of life or spirituality.
In a Nov. 7 letter, 34 of the 39 Little Sisters said they “have no other choice but to renounce our vows.”
The Vatican didn’t immediately comment Thursday.
Francis charmed by visit of disabled child
VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis praised the freedom — albeit “undisciplined”—of a disabled child who climbed onto the stage Wednesday to play during the pontiff’s general audience.
The Swiss Guards and Vatican gendarmes stood by Wednesday and gamely let 6-year-old Wenzel Wirth run around Francis as monsignors read out his catechism lesson in various languages in the Vatican audience hall.
At one point, the boy’s Argentine-Italian mother came on stage to fetch him and explained to Francis that he couldn’t speak. Francis told her, “Let him be, let him be,” and the mother retreated and let Wenzel continue to play.
When Francis took the microphone, he explained in Spanish to the crowd that the child was speech-impaired. “But he knows how to communicate, to express himself,” he said.
“And he has something that made me think: He’s free. Undiciplined-ly free, but he’s free,” a chuckling Francis said to applause from the crowd. “It made me think, ‘Am I so free before God?’”
“When Jesus says we have to be like children, it means we need to have the freedom that a child has before his father,” Francis continued. “I think this child preaches to all of us. And let us ask for the grace of speech (for him).”