The Roman Catholic Church will allow priests throughout the world to grant absolution for abortion, the Vatican said on Monday, making permanent a policy that Pope Francis announced a year ago.
In a document marking the conclusion of the church’s year-long Jubilee of Mercy, the pope extended a policy of allowing priests — and not only bishops or special confessors — to grant forgiveness for abortion, which the church considers a sin. The announcement was a signal of the pope’s vision of a more welcoming, merciful and inclusive church.
While firmly restating his opposition to abortion as “a grave sin, since it puts an end to an innocent life,” the pope affirmed that “there is no sin that God’s mercy cannot reach and wipe away when it finds a repentant heart seeking to be reconciled with the Father.”
Photo: AP
The document, an apostolic letter, was signed on Sunday after a Mass denoting the end of the jubilee year. It was made public on Monday.
Pope Francis’ decision last year, at the start of the jubilee, followed in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, who granted priests the same right during the previous holy year, in 2000.
Under canon law, abortion brings automatic excommunication unless the person receiving or performing it confesses and receives absolution. Abortion is considered a “reserved sin,” meaning that permission to grant forgiveness usually must come from a bishop.
Bishops could already delegate the authority to grant absolution to parish priests — and many bishops in the US had done so — but the practice varied widely by country and even by diocese. In parts of the world, observant Catholics who have sought absolution for abortions have faced delays at times, or even rejection.
In some places, priests have been delegated the power to absolve abortions during certain times of the year, like Lent, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, said at a news conference at the Vatican on Monday.
“Now that right is extended to all priests,” he said, adding that changes would have to be made to canon law to reflect the new practice.
The decision underscores the pope’s idea of a church that leaves nobody outside its doors, and the apostolic letter calls on the clergy and the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to reflect, and to act, upon the message at the heart of the year-long meditation on mercy.
In the document, a blend of religious teachings and acute social commentary, “Pope Francis delineates the path of the future life of the church so that it can always be an instrument of mercy toward everyone, without ever excluding anyone,” Fisichella said.
The archbishop said that the apostolic letter offered guidelines to priests who were called on to exercise forgiveness, referring to an April proclamation on family life that, among other things, created a path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive holy communion.
Francis’ letter also noted that the church would celebrate a World Day of the Poor every November “to help communities and each of the baptized to reflect on how poverty is at the very heart of the Gospel.”
He also called on the faithful to “promote a culture of mercy based on the rediscovery of encounter with others, a culture in which no one looks at another with indifference or turns away from the suffering of our brothers and sisters.”
At a ceremony naming 17 new cardinals on Saturday, the pope warned against what he described as a “virus of polarization and animosity.”
He said that “in God’s heart there are no enemies,” and chided those who “raise walls, build barriers and label people.”
The comments were seen by some Vatican observers as a rebuke to calls by US president-elect Donald Trump to build a border wall and to restrict Muslims from entering the US.
Pope Francis did not single out any country, but he has expressed dismay over the harsh tone on immigration that Trump has taken.
In February, the pope suggested that Trump was “not Christian” because of the campaign promise to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Trump, who is not Catholic, called the pope’s admonishments “disgraceful.”
The pope on Saturday decried the tendency to treat “a stranger, an immigrant or a refugee” as the enemy, warning that such thinking invited hatred.
“Little by little, our differences turn into symptoms of hostility, threats and violence,” he said.
Harassment and violence against immigrants and other marginalized groups surged after Election Day in the US, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and domestic extremist groups.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the