The clerical abuse crisis and the “crisis of credibility” it created for the U.S. bishops have led to serious divisions within the U.S. church and to a temptation to look for administrative solutions to problems that go much deeper, Pope Francis told the U.S. bishops.

Without a clear and decisive focus on spiritual conversion and Gospel-inspired ways of responding to victims and exercising ministry, “everything we do risks being tainted by self-referentiality, self preservation and defensiveness, and thus doomed from the start,” the Pope wrote.

In a letter distributed to the bishops at the beginning of their Jan. 2-8 retreat, Pope Francis said he was convinced their response to the “sins and crimes” of abuse and “the efforts made to deny or conceal them” must be found through “heartfelt, prayerful and collective listening to the word of God and to the pain of our people.”

“As we know,” he said, “the mentality that would cover things up, far from helping to resolve conflicts, enabled them to fester and cause even greater harm to the network of relationships that today we are called to heal and restore.”

The “abuses of power and conscience and sexual abuse, and the poor way that they were handled” continue to harm the church and its mission, he said, but so does “the pain of seeing an episcopate lacking in unity and concentrated more on pointing fingers than on seeking paths of reconciliation.”

Such a division, which goes well beyond a “healthy” diversity of opinions, is what caused him to recommend a retreat because, the Pope said, “this situation forces us to look to what is essential and to rid ourselves of all that stands in the way of a clear witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The gathering be led by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household. Pope Francis said church leaders must “abandon a modus operandi of disparaging, discrediting, playing the victim or the scold in our relationships,” and instead listen to the “gentle breeze” of the Gospel message.

Father Alain Clément Amiézi is a doctor in dogmatic theology and professor at Sacred Heart of Mary Major Seminary at Anyama in Ivory Coast. In his new book, Baptêmeet engagement prophétique pour uneÉgliseadulte en Afrique (Baptism and prophetic commitment for an adult Church in Africa), he focuses on the meaning of baptism and its implications.

“The majority of our African churches have already celebrated the centenary of the beginning of their evangelization. Logically, we should now be talking about an adult Church. But at the qualitative level, it is clear that there is still a lot of work to be done. The percentage of those who continue and who complete their Christian initiation by confirmation after the great festivities that accompany the reception of baptism is very low in several African countries today.

The number of the faithful who are truly committed in the social and political fields on the basis of Gospel virtues is infinitesimal.

We are producing baptized people but not Christians. We provide them with the sacraments without evangelizing them. The responsibilities for this situation are shared.

On one hand, in my view, it is linked to the fact that certain catechumens are requesting baptism for the wrong reasons. On the other, it is linked to the quality of the formation received.”

On the impact baptism have on the life of African Christians he said: “Prophetic commitment involves three aspects.

First, there is Christian coherence which invites us to break with the dichotomy that often exists between the life of faith and everyday life at work, school and in the family.

Christian life is not an overcoat that one can leave at the parish door and collect again when leaving. The second aspect is courageous witness. Our African countries need Christians capable of breaking with the notion that “everyone acts like that” and who are capable of living out their faith through their Christian commitment at social, economic and political level.

The third aspect is to develop a spirituality that assumes and allows Christians to courageously face up to existential problems.

Catholics from around the world living in the United Arab Emirates are waiting with great anticipation for Pope Francis’s on Feb. 3-5 visit, the first papal trip to the Arabian Peninsula.

“Pope Francis is the ambassa dor of peace, courageously crossing borders and fostering personal encounters with religious leaders, heads of states and humanitarian organizations in the Arab world,” said Father Johnson Kadukkan, parish priest at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Abu Dhabi, where Francis will stop for a private visit on Feb. 5 before celebrating Mass at Zayed Sports City Stadium.

There are eight Catholic Churches throughout the seven emirates of the UAE, with a ninth church under construction. Each church offers an extensive schedule of “weekend” Masses, all of which are full. Since the UAE is an Islamic country and Friday is considered a day of prayer for Muslims, Catholics attend weekend Mass on Friday or Saturday; Sunday is a workday.

St Joseph’s Cathedral in Abu Dhabi, for example, has about 90,000 parishioners, with eight priests celebrating nearly 20 Masses during the weekend in various languages: Arabic, English, Tagalog, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean, Polish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Sinhalese and the Indian languages of Konkani, Malayalam and Tamil.

As the Catholic Church struggled to recover from the tumultuous effects of the Protestant Reformation, art historian Elizabeth Lev believes that it was the Church’s embrace of art that effectively saved the faith. Lev, an Americanborn, Rome-based scholar, is one of the most sought after guides in Rome who makes the treasures of the Eternal City more relevant than ever.

In her new book, How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in CounterReformation Art, Lev chronicles how individuals such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio, and lesser known artists such Annibale Carracci and Lavinia Fontana, turned to stone and canvas to combat challenges to the faith.

Why after the Protestant Reformation, where language (95 theses, in fact!) had been used to contest Catholicism, did the Church turn to art to recapture the essentials of the faith?

“The printed word can be painful, as anyone who has been trolled on the Internet will tell you. In the wake of Martin Luther’s famous theses, a flood of printed pamphlets overwhelmed people with conflicting information, polemical statements, and sometimes outright name-calling. While the Catholic Church excelled at scholastic tomes, literary click bait was not its forte, so it turned to art, where it had 1300 years of experience of communication through images. While the Protestants were debating to clast or not to clast with icons, the Catholic were sponsoring beautiful images that would draw people together, gazing in the same direction at artwork designed to point to the divine. These paintings still attract millions of viewers today, even though many tourists no longer understand the teachings or the stories behind them. It was a brilliant PR coup, deploying artists as visual preachers to the public.”