August 3, 2023

A daily news briefing from Catholic News Agency, powered by artificial intelligence. Ask your smart speaker to play “Catholic News,” or listen every morning wherever you get podcasts. www.catholicnewsagency.com - Acknowledging the discouragement that can be experienced by Catholic leaders in secularizing societies, Pope Francis on Wednesday urged a gathering of Portuguese clergy, consecrated people, and pastoral workers to stay in the boat with Jesus and revive their “restless” enthusiasm for spreading the Gospel. The pope delivered the encouraging message in his homily for Wednesday vespers, or evening prayer, to bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated persons, seminarians, and pastoral workers gathered in the church of Lisbon’s iconic Mosterio dos Jerónimos, a former monastery now used as a public ceremony hall and museum space. The official welcoming ceremony for World Youth Day with Pope Francis will take place at Meeting Hill (Eduardo VII Park) later today. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/254976/pope-francs-world-youth-day-lisbon-vespers-evangelization The chairman of the US bishops’ peace committee this week urged Catholics to pray fervently for progress in nuclear arms control, warning of the thousands of nuclear weapons in the world today and the “horrors” that would result from a nuclear exchange, ahead of the 78th anniversary of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those attacks brought about an end to World War II at the cost of upwards of 200,000 Japanese civilian lives; they remain to date the only use of nuclear weapons in war. “With the wars and threat of wars today, the menace of over 10,000 nuclear weapons in our world must not recede further from the public consciousness of today’s generation,” the bishops said. The bishop in his statement urged the world to “remain vigilant never to lose sight of the extraordinary dangers these weapons pose to humanity” and to “be attentive to the differences between just and unjust considerations of statecraft.” https://www.catholicnewsage