Bishop Wellington de Queiroz Vieira of Cristalandia
Photo:Daniel Ibanez/CNA Vocation crisis caused by lack of holiness not celibacy – bishop
A bishop in Brazil who is a member of the Amazon synod has said he believes a major obstacle to increasing priestly vocations in the region is a lack of personal holiness among the ordained, rather than the discipline of celibacy.
Bishop Wellington de Queiroz Vieira of Cristalandia said that the proposal to combat priest shortages in the Amazon region by ordaining mature, married men – called viri probati – to the priesthood does not address a greater problem.
Noting that he does not speak for all synod fathers, but that he knows many of them share his views, de Queiroz said the real obstacles to increasing local priestly vocations are scandals and a lack of holiness in bishops, priests, and deacons.
The bishop said clergy need to be close to their people as Pope Francis says: “But very often we do that, but do not convey the perfume of Christ. And we are not able to convey the real message.”
Instead, clerics often drive people away from Christ, he said, or very easily are “proclaimers of ourselves”.
“We are not always holy priests and holy bishops in our own Churches,” he said, adding that before talking about changing as a Church, people should think about changing themselves.
God wants all people to be saved, Pope tells crowds
God wills the salvation of all persons, Pope Francis has said, reflecting on the Acts of the Apostles. God “wants his children to overcome all particularism in order to be open to the universality of salvation”, the Pope said in St Peter’s Square during his general audience last week.
“This is the aim: to overcome particularism and open oneself to the universality of salvation, because God wants to save everyone. Those who are reborn by water and the Spirit – the baptised – are called to come out of themselves and open themselves up to others, to live close together, in the style of living together, which transforms every interpersonal relationship into an experience of fraternity.”
He said St Peter is “the witness of this process of ‘fraternisation’ that the Spirit wants to trigger in history, citing Peter’s vision in which he was told to eat animals that were impure in Jewish law.
Amazon synod statues stolen and thrown in river
Two men entered a Catholic Church near the Vatican early this Monday and stole copies of a statue of a pregnant woman that had been a centrepiece of several prayer services connected to the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon.
In a video shared with bloggers and Catholic news outlets that have complained about the statue being a pagan symbol, the two men set the statues on the railing of a bridge over the Tiber River and knocked them in, watching them float away.
The statues of a kneeling pregnant woman “represented life, fertility, Mother Earth”, Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, told reporters on October 21.
Stealing the statues and throwing them in the river, he said, “is a gesture that contradicts the spirit of dialogue”.
“I don’t know what else to say except that it was a theft and perhaps that speaks for itself,” Ruffini said. Police are investigating the theft.
The statues had been kept in several side chapels at the Church of St Mary in Traspontina where prayer services connected to the synod have been held daily since the gathering began in early October.