Cardinal’s arrest

Commenting editorially on the arrest of Cardinal Zen by the Chinese government, La Croix International said: “The arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen by the Hong Kong government this week is bad news for the Vatican.

It’s true that the 90-year-old cardinal, who is in poor health, has been released. But he is out on bail and will face a trial. By targeting the man nicknamed the ‘conscience of Hong Kong’ who has been a tireless defender of human rights on the island, Beijing is conveying to Pope Francis the fragility and ambiguity of the rapprochement it initiated in 2018 with the Vatican, a rapprochement that Zen has criticised. He has always seen it as the pope compromising with an increasingly harsh regime.”

Daily holiness

During the canonisation of 10 new saints last Sunday, Pope Francis said: “Holiness does not consist of a few heroic gestures, but of many small acts of daily love. At times, by overemphasising our efforts to do good works, we have created an ideal of holiness excessively based our heroics… our readiness for self-sacrifice to achieve a reward.

We turned holiness into an unattainable goal, separated it from everyday life, instead of embracing it in our daily routines, in the dust of the streets, in the trials of real life, and, in the words of Teresa of Avila to her Sisters, ‘among the pots and pans’.

We are called to serve, that is, not to put our own interests first: to clear our systems of the poison of greed and competitiveness; to fight the cancer of indifference and the worm of self-referentiality. Specifically, we should ask ourselves, ‘What do I do for others?’”

Right to defence

Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher told Italy’s RAI state television that “Ukraine has the right to defend itself, and it needs help to do so”, but such arms delivery “has to be proportional. This war is more dangerous [than other wars have] ever been, because of the nuclear dimension.”

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)