The characteristics that make Mary a role model for all women, regardless of their religious beliefs.

March 1 was special this year. It not only marked the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday, but it was also the first day of Women’s History Month. And who brings greater honor to women than the Virgin Mary herself? Leaving aside religious questions, we have to recognize that she is a truly remarkable woman. These are five qualities that I learned from her:

1. Sense of family

Stability is not only a gift to us as individuals. It is a gift to others.

Benedict’s monks and nuns take vows of obedience, stability and conversion of life. Obedience helps to break a person’s selfish will and makes us open to respond with alacrity to the will of God. Stability is the second of three vows, which operate in a together like the three strands of a braided rope.

Anniversary of the election of Francis, Gianni Valente’s third episode. The yard of changes in the curial structure and the trap of neo-triumphalism

Pope Francis has said it many times - even to Die Zeit - that he is a fallible sinner. The poor among the people of God feel the closeness of this confession, as a companionship a sort of comfort, because it reminds everyone that even the Pope walks his path because he is embraced and supported by the mercy and blessing of God.

Lent is a time of deep prayer, an opportunity for Catholics to look more closely for the sacred in ordinary life, while also reflecting on the humanity of Christ. Finding God in all things — one of the core perspectives of Ignatian spirituality, named for St. Ignatius of Loyola — is something that plays a key role in transforming many Catholics’ spiritual lives.

Pray Like St. Ignatius

Four years later. Second episode of Gianni Valente’s analysis. When Christian faith is replaced by religious ideologic

The ecclesiastical hostility reserved to Pope Francis, in all its various gradations, is unprecedented in the history of the last centuries.

So long as we live in this world we cannot escape suffering and temptation. Whence it is written in Job: "The life of man upon earth is a warfare." Everyone, therefore, must guard against temptation and must watch in prayer lest the devil, who never sleeps but goes about seeking whom he may devour, find occasion to deceive him. No one is so perfect or so holy but he is sometimes tempted; man cannot be altogether free from temptation.

Cardinal Parolin speaks to Vatican Radio about the pontificate anniversary and the changes within the Curia: we need "a genuine return to God and an authentic manifestation of the church’s true nature".

“No matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake. Come to me with your misery and sins, with your troubles and needs, and with all of your longing to be loved.”

“Jesus is God, therefore His love, His Thirst, is infinite. He, the creator of the universe, asked for the love of His creatures. He thirsts for our love... These words: 'I Thirst' – do they echo in our souls?” —St. Teresa of Calcutta

Msgr. Anthony Figueiredo warns that there is a brief window of opportunity, and that if Christians don't respond to what is happening in the world today, it may be too late to effect change.

There is an attack on family life; and the only way back is through prayer. That's the message from Msgr. Anthony J. Figueiredo, a full-time Consultant to the newly established Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development.

To understand how Christ’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well portrayed in John’s Gospel was remarkable, we should first understand the Samaritan people and why they were so reviled. The Samaritans were a mixed population who worshipped God differently from the Jews. While they worshipped the one true God, they only held the first five Books of Moses to be Sacred Scripture; rejecting the rest of the Jewish testament. Also, they worshipped on Mount Gerizium in the Palestinian West Bank, not at the Temple in Jerusalem.