Ability to ‘see’ can dissolve racism – Ghana cardinal
The Zulu way of greeting, in which people greet others by saying “Sawubona”, meaning “I see you”, points a way towards how we can dissolve racism, Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has said.
Speaking at ‘Black and White in America: How deep the divide?’, a conference in Birmingham, Alabama, the cardinal said “The healing of racism begins in our own hearts. How our hearts would be shaped if everyone learned to greet each other in the Zulu manner!”
The effect of racism, he said, is “to render people invisible, and from that follows the denial of human dignity, then loss of identity, then personal despair, then social and political distrust”.
This “invites us to self-examination”, he said, urging us to ask ourselves how often do we overlook people who differ from us. “Admitting my failure to see the other as human is to begin the struggle to vanquish unconscious bias and interpersonal racism,” he said.
Become the message you share, papal preacher urges
Proclaiming God’s word is an implicit final stage in how we read the Scriptures for spiritual growth, the preacher to the papal household has said.
Recalling in his third Lenten homily how St James had offered an approach to the Scriptures that entails reading, meditating, and applying the word, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap. said that sharing the word through its proclamation is a necessary fourth step. The Vatican II document Dei Verbum had said little on this, he said, because the topic was addressed in a different conciliar text.
Distinguishing evangelisation from preaching, he argued Christians can evangelise not just with their words but with their lives, drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message” to hold that if preachers give their lives wholly to Christ, then it can be said of them that “their very life is their message”.
24 hours for the Lord begins with call to look beyond the surface
Sin impoverishes and isolates us, blinding us to what is important and leading us to focus on the superficial, Pope Francis has said.
Urging Christians to cast aside “all that prevents us from racing towards him,” he challenged pastors especially to re-examine those behaviours that may cause people to shy away.
“We must certainly not water down the demands of the Gospel, but we cannot risk frustrating the desire of the sinner to be reconciled with the Father,” he said.
‘Ideological colonisation’ fears reality – Pope Francis
The Pope has warned Christians against new forms of “ideological colonisation” that appear under the guise of promoting virtue, modernity and new attitudes.
Addressing participants in the Pontifical Academy for Life’s plenary assembly, he said speaking of true virtue entails understanding how the choice to do good involves our whole being and “is not a question of a ‘cosmetic’ or exterior embellishment that does not bear fruit”.
Maintaining that science and technology are not enough in themselves, and that “the wisdom of the heart is necessary” to do good, he cautioned against forms of social conditioning that “deprive one of freedom”, and “are ideologies that are afraid of reality as God has created it”.
