2023-08-07 21:26:24
Pope Francis held his usual “flying press conference” on Sunday evening on his flight home from Lisbon to Rome. It lasted around 25 minutes. The Pope took the opportunity to reiterate his message, emphasized on several occasions in Lisbon, that the universal Church must be “open to all”. This message was so important to him when he attended the 37th World Youth Day from Wednesday to Sunday that he had his listeners repeat the (Spanish and Portuguese) word “todos” (all) three times on several occasions – in a kind of Trinitarian commitment to inclusion .
Matthias Rüb
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.
When asked by a journalist who was traveling with him how this concept of the “open church for all” could be reconciled with the fact that access to the sacraments in the universal church is not open to everyone – women not to the sacrament of priests, homosexual couples not to the sacrament of marriage , remarried divorced people usually do not attend the sacrament of communion – the Pope replied that this question had to be answered from “two different perspectives”. On the one hand, access to the church is basically “open to everyone”. On the other hand, specific “legislation would regulate life within the Church”. Anyone who has entered the church without barriers, so to speak, is then subject to this legislation. “This does not mean that the church is closed,” the pope continued. On the one hand, the church is the unconditionally loving mother who accompanies every believer on his or her own path in the church. On the other hand, the church as an institution must “move the flock forward”.
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