We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 29, 2025 / 16:29 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday participated in the Mass celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica on the occasion of the Jubilee of Digital Missionaries and Catholic Influencers, encouraging them to create encounters “between hearts” regardless of the number of followers they have.

The Holy Father arrived at the Vatican basilica at the end of the Mass, which was celebrated by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization.

More than a thousand Catholics from different countries participated in the event, which also coincided with the Jubilee of Youth, filling the basilica with young and enthusiastic faces.

In his address — delivered in Italian, English, and Spanish — Pope Leo XIV shared three missions or challenges when it comes to evangelizing online:

1. Proclaim peace to the world.

For Pope Leo, peace “needs to be sought, proclaimed, and shared everywhere; both in places where we see the tragedy of war and in the empty hearts of those who have lost any meaning of life and the desire for introspection and the spiritual life.”

Leo emphasized that “today more than ever, we need missionary disciples who convey the gift of the risen Lord to the world” and who give voice to the hope that the living Jesus gives us “to the ends of the earth” and to “the farthest reaches, where there is no hope.” 

2. Seek the “suffering flesh of Christ” in those one encounters.

The Holy Father asked Catholic influencers to always seek “the suffering flesh of Christ” in every brother or sister they encounter online.

In the context of a new culture shaped by technology, he appealed to the responsibility of digital missionaries to ensure that culture “remains human.”

“Nothing that comes from man and his creativity should be used to undermine the dignity of others. Our mission — your mission — is to nurture a culture of Christian humanism and to do so together. This is the beauty of the ‘internet’ for all of us,” the pope stated.

Faced with cultural changes throughout history, the pope emphasized that “the Church has never remained passive; she has always sought to illuminate every age with the light and hope of Christ by discerning good from evil and what was good from what needed to be changed, transformed, and purified.”

Given the challenge of artificial intelligence, the Holy Father emphasized that we must reflect on the authenticity of our witness, “on our ability to listen and speak, and on our capacity to understand and to be understood.  We have a duty to work together to develop a way of thinking, to develop a language, of our time, that gives voice to love,” he noted.

“It is not simply a matter of generating content but of creating an encounter of hearts. This will entail seeking out those who suffer, those who need to know the Lord, so that they may heal their wounds, get back on their feet, and find meaning in their lives,” the pontiff added.

To achieve this, he advised “accepting our own poverty, letting go of all pretense and recognizing our own inherent need for the Gospel. And this process is a communal endeavor.”

3. Go and mend the nets.

Just as Jesus called his first apostles while they were mending their fishing nets, Pope Leo XIV said that “he also asks this of us.”

The pope noted that “he asks the same of us today. Indeed, he asks us to weave other nets: networks of relationships, of love, of gratuitous sharing where friendship is profound and authentic.”

“Networks where we can mend what has been broken, heal from loneliness, not focus on the number of followers but experience the greatness of infinite love in every encounter,” he counseled.

In short, the pontiff encouraged the missionaries and influencers to create “networks that give space to others more than to ourselves, where no ‘bubble’ can silence the voices of the weakest; networks that liberate and save; networks that help us rediscover the beauty of looking into each other’s eyes; networks of truth. In this way, every story of shared goodness will be a knot in a single, immense network: the network of networks, the network of God.”

He also invited them to be “agents of communion” and to avoid individualism. Finally, he thanked them for their commitment and for the help they offer to those suffering, and “for your journey along the virtual highways.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

National Catholic Register, Jul 29, 2025 / 15:59 pm (CNA).

Canon law professor Edward Peters is the third faculty member at Detroit’s seminary to announce that he has been fired by Archbishop Edward Weisenburger in recent days.

Peters, 68, had taught at Sacred Heart Major Seminary since 2005.

“My Sacred Heart Major Seminary teaching contract was terminated by Abp. Weisenburger this week. I have retained counsel,” Peters wrote in a social media post Friday night.

“Except to offer my prayers for those affected by this news and to ask for theirs in return, I have no further comment at this time,” Peters said.

A representative of the Archdiocese of Detroit declined to comment Monday, telling the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, by email on Monday that “the Archdiocese of Detroit does not comment on archdiocesan or seminary personnel matters.”

Peters is an adviser to the Apostolic Signatura, which is the Holy See’s highest administrative tribunal. He was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to that position in May 2010, “becoming the first layman so appointed since the reconstitution of Signatura over 100 years ago,” according to an online biography.

Peters earned a doctorate in canon law from The Catholic University of America in 1991.

He published an English translation of the 1917 Code of Canon Law in 2001 and a textual history of the 1983 Code of Canon Law in 2005.

Two theologians — Ralph Martin, 82, and Eduardo Echeverria, 74 — were fired from Detroit’s seminary on July 23, they told the Register last week.

Martin told the Register the firing was “a shock” and that he didn’t get a full explanation for it.

“When I asked him for an explanation, he said he didn’t think it would be helpful to give any specifics but mentioned something about having concerns about my theological perspectives,” Martin said in a written statement, as the Register reported last week.

One thing all three now-former faculty members have in common is that they criticized Pope Francis publicly during the late pope’s pontificate.

In Peters’ case, he chided Pope Francis in his canon law blog, called “In Light of the Law.”

In April 2016, he described what he called “writing flaws” in Pope Francis’ encyclical Amoris Laetitia, keying in on Francis’ interest in allowing divorced and civilly remarried Catholics “in certain cases” to have “the help of the sacraments,” including the Eucharist.

Peters wrote that the encyclical makes what he called “a serious misuse of a conciliar teaching” of Vatican II when it conflates the periodic abstinence from sexual intercourse that a married couple may make with what he called “the angst” that “public adulterers experience when they cease engaging in illicit sexual intercourse.”

In August 2018, Peters criticized Pope Francis’ statements condemning the death penalty, referring to what he called “serious magisterial issues that I think Francis’ novel formulation has engendered” and saying he had “grave concerns” about Pope Francis’ “alteration” of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on that issue.

Weisenburger, who was installed March 18 as archbishop of Detroit after serving as bishop of Tucson, Arizona, for a little more than seven years, is an admirer of Pope Francis, as he made clear during a press conference on April 21, the day Pope Francis died. The archbishop called Francis “the perfect man at the right time” and suggested he was “a saint,” as the Register reported last week.

This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.

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