Pope prays for peace in Nigeria, M’East, others

POPE Francis on Thursday prayed for
peace in Nigeria, the Middle East
and in countries including Ukraine,
South Sudan and the Central African
Republic, USA Today reports.
Francis said vast numbers of
children today were victims of
violence, objects of trade and
trafficking, or forced to become
soldiers, and they need to be
saved, New York Times reports.
Francis spoke of “children displaced
due to war and persecution, abused
and taken advantage of before our
very eyes and our complicit
silence.” He singled out “infants
massacred in bomb attacks,”
including Pakistan, where 132
children were killed in a Taliban
attack on a school this month.
“So many abused children,” Francis
said, in one of several off-the-cuff
asides during the address, known
as the “Urbi et Orbi” message —
Latin for “to the city and the world”
— that popes traditionally deliver
to the world’s 1.2 billion Roman
Catholics on special occasions like
Christmas.
In calling for global peace and for
an end to violence and conflict in
the Middle East, Ukraine and parts
of Africa, Francis went off script to
denounce “the globalization of
indifference” that permits suffering
and injustice to persist.
“So many men and women
immersed in worldliness and
indifference” are affected by
hardness of the heart, he said,
calling for reflection and change.
And he chided the Vatican’s
bureaucratic machine in another
address this week for losing touch
with its spiritual side in the pursuit
of power.
As Christians exchanged gifts and
shared family meals, the pope’s
thoughts were with the world’s
dispossessed; refugees and exiles;
those suffering “brutal” ethnic or
religious persecution; and those
held as hostages or killed because
of their religious beliefs.
“Truly there are so many tears this
Christmas,” Francis said from the
central balcony of St. Peter’s
Basilica before thousands of faithful
in the square below. The address
was also broadcast live on the
Internet.
To underscore his closeness to
those suffering religious
persecution, a theme of his nearly
two years as pope, on Christmas
Eve, Francis spoke with displaced
Christians who are in a tent camp in
northern Iraq and told them that
they were like Jesus. Many in the
camps have been forced to leave
their homes by militants of the
Islamic State.
“You are like Jesus on the night of
his birth when he had been forced
to flee,” the pope told them in a
telephone call broadcast live by an
Italian Catholic television station.
“You are like Jesus in this situation,
and that means we are praying
even harder for you.”
The pope also denounced abortion,
and his thoughts turned to “infants
killed in the womb, deprived of
that generous love of their parents
and then buried in the egoism of a
culture that does not love life.”
In his message on Thursday, the
pope said he hoped that the world
would respond to the plight of the
needy by increasing humanitarian
aid, and he asked “that the
necessary assistance and treatment
be provided” for the victims of
Ebola.
Closing the address, he called on
Jesus’ strength to turn “arms into
plowshares, destruction into
creativity, hatred into love and
tenderness.”
In Britain, the archbishop of
Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin
Welby, the spiritual leader of the
Church of England, pulled out of the
traditional Christmas Day ceremony
at Canterbury Cathedral because of
what his office described as a
“severe cold.”
A draft of the sermon he had
planned to deliver, and which was
released on his website, reflected
on the temporary truce on
Christmas Day in 1914, early in the
First World War, between British
and German soldiers.
“The problem is that the way it is
told now it seems to end with a
‘happy ever after,’” the draft said.
It added: “The following day the
war continued with the same
severity. Nothing had changed; it
was a one-day wonder. That is not
the world in which we live —
truces are rare.”

Man of God