Pope’s Ukraine peace envoy heads to China on mission to help return Ukraine children taken to Russia
Ox-pulled floats with sacred images of Mary draw thousands to Portugal’s wine-country procession
LAMEGO, Portugal – Galego and Cabano, two darkhaired oxen, pulled the sacred image of Our Lady of Remedies on a procession float for more than two hours through this small town in Portugal’s wine country.
Lamego’s festival, nicknamed “Portugal’s pilgrimage,” is one of the oldest and largest of the many religious feasts that throughout summer draw tens of thousands of people to hamlets and metropolises. They remain popular in this rapidly secularizing country, where the Catholic Church has been reckoning this year with a long-ignored clergy sexual abuse scandal that Pope Francis addressed when he marked World Youth Day last month in Lisbon.
Recently, people two or three deep lined the procession route, many having staked out a spot with folded stools the night before. More observed from festively draped windows.
They watched in silence as oxen pulled five floats. Proceeding with them were solemn marching bands, the bishop and local clergy carrying a sacred relic, and about 200 faithful in historical or Biblical dress.
At least 50 were women dressed in pink and blue like the Virgin statue, carrying Jesus dolls or real babies.
That combination of faith and local traditions helps the Catholic Church remain an important institution in contemporary Portugal, where 80% of citizens describe themselves as Catholic, according to Alfredo Teixeira, a theology professor at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon.
The festivities – which aside from the Sept. 8 procession also include more than two weeks of markets, fairs and concerts – give a needed boost to the local economy. While most villages in Portugal’s interior are slowly depopulating, even former residents come back for these feasts.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Vatican opens up a palazzo built on ancient Roman ruins and housing its highly secretive tribunals
ROME – The Vatican recently opened the doors to one of Renaissance Rome’s most spectacular palazzos, normally hidden from public view since it houses some of the Holy See’s most secretive offices: the ecclesial tribunals that decide everything from marriage annulments to plenary indulgences.
The Palazzo della Cancelleria is located near the Campo dei Fiori market at the start of the Via del Pellegrino, named for the religious pilgrims who used it to walk towards St. Peter’s Basilica on the other side of the Tiber River. It was built in the late 1400s on the ruins of a paleo-Christian church as a residence for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, whose uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, is perhaps best known for having commissioned an even more spectacular masterpiece, the Sistine Chapel.
The head of the Vatican’s patrimony office, Monsignor Nunzio Galantino, invited television cameras into the imposing, block-long palazzo as part of what he said was Pope Francis’ call for the Holy See to be more transparent. For Galantino, whose office has published a consolidated Vatican budget for the past three years, that spirit of transparency extends to the Vatican’s vast real estate holdings.
“Transparency isn’t just quantitative knowledge of the patrimony; transparency also touches on knowing the qualitative patrimony,” he said, standing in one of the palazzo’s grand reception rooms that art historian Claudia Conforti said was decorated as a “colossal propaganda machine” for the then-reigning Pope Paul III.
ROME – Pope Francis’ Ukraine peace envoy, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, is heading to China on the fourth leg of a mission that has already brought him to Kyiv, Moscow and Washington, the Vatican said Tuesday.
The main aim of the shuttle diplomacy is to help return Ukrainian children taken to Russia after the invasion.
Zuppi, accompanied by an official from the Vatican secretariat of state, will be in Beijing from Wednesday to Friday. The Vatican described the visit as a “further step in the mission desired by the pope to support humanitarian initiatives and the search for paths that can bring about a just peace.”
Francis tapped Zuppi, a veteran of the Catholic Church’s peace diplomacy, in May as his envoy, aiming to “initiate paths of peace.” Over time, Zuppi’s mission has concentrated on the humanitarian front and in particular in trying to establish a mechanism to help Ukrainian children who were moved to Russia following the invasion which began in Feb. 2022.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in late March for Russia’s minister for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine. Russian officials have denied any forced adoptions, saying some Ukrainian children are in foster care.