Pope to back ACN's Year of Mercy appeal

Pope Francis

Pope Francis is to give his personal support to an awareness and fund-raising campaign organised by a leading Catholic charity to mark the Year of Mercy. Aid to the Church in Need's "Be God's Mercy" initiative will be launched at a press conference on 17 June. The Pope is personally associating himself with the campaign through a video message to be released the same day in which he highlights ACN's work.

ACN projects supported during the four-month "Be God's Mercy" campaign include prison ministry, drug rehabilitation centres, support groups for women who have suffered violence. In his video message, the Pope says: "I am entrusting these works to Aid to the Church in Need."

For Christians and others who fled Islamist terror group Daesh (ISIS) in Iraq, the Pope has supported an ACN project providing medicine for St Joseph's Clinic, Erbil, in the Kurdish north of the country, which serves 2,800 displaced people. The Pope's financial support was sent to ACN project partner Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, who will be speaking at the launch.

Also speaking at the press conference will be Archbishop Sebastian Shaw of Lahore, Pakistan, who will give an account of the atrocity on Sunday, 27 March in Lahore where suicide bombers killed 76 people in a park, many of them Christians celebrating on Easter Day. Pakistan is the focus of three "Be God's Mercy" projects - support for victims of the March 2015 suicide bomb blasts on two churches in Yohannabad, outside Lahore, as well as increased security both for St John's, one of the two churches in question, and the nearby St Francis Xavier Major Seminary.

The initiative, which ends on 4 October, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, a saint close to the Pope's heart, has the support of ACN's network of fund-raising and awareness-raising offices in 22 countries around the world, including Britain.

Good relations between Pope Francis and ACN go back a long way. While still Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio carried out a number of projects with the help of ACN. In a letter written to mark the 60th anniversary of the charity in 2007, the future Pope described the charity as a "symbol of communion and fraternity with the suffering Church".

Link:

Aid to the Church in Need

www.acnuk.org/