Advent is the season of waiting and anticipating the coming light.
“Advent means dawn coming. It’s like a new beginning,” said Father Matthew Lowry, chaplain at Holy Trinity Newman Center on the Flagstaff campus of Northern Arizona University.
“The Lord is always trying to break into our lives,” the priest said, adding that Christ, the light, can work through any darkness we encounter at school or elsewhere.
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, president of Caritas Internationalis, a confederation of Catholic charities around the world, has issued the following 2019 Advent Message:
As together we start the period of Advent, I remember vividly where I was this time last year.
Pope Francis responded to many questions posed to him by the journalists during the flight bringing them back to Rome from Japan. Here is the unofficial translation–provided by Vatican News–of the in-flight press conference:
On Sunday, November 24, Pope Francis denounced the money squandered on the manufacture of atomic weapons as “an affront crying out to heaven".
Pope Francis’ words broke the great silence commemorating the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking in these two city-symbols of nuclear destruction, the Pope’s decisive condemnation of both the use and the possession of atomic weapons, marks a further development in the Church’s social teaching.
NAGASAKI – The following is the official translation of the full text of a message Pope Francis delivered Sunday, November 24, in an address in Nagasaki.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
This place makes us deeply aware of the pain and horror that we human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another. The damaged cross and statue of Our Lady recently discovered in the Cathedral of Nagasaki remind us once more of the unspeakable horror suffered in the flesh by the victims of the bombing and their families.
How is the Gospel proclaimed? Starting from the loving gaze Jesus had for all he encountered. This is how Pope Francis speaks of mission and inculturation in Thailand.
During Pope Francis’s apostolic visit to Thailand on 20-23 November, Thai Catholics "will have the opportunity to be Church, live the faith they received and reconfirm it grouped around the pontiff,” said Fr Maurizio Arioldi, superior delegate of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME) for Thailand and Myanmar, speaking to AsiaNews.
The clergyman is parish priest at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Blessed Chiara Luce Badano in Ngao, in the northern province of Lampang, Diocese of Chiang Rai.
There is a hell. Not a very original statement, you think. I will repeat it, then: There is a hell! Echo it for me, at the right moment, in the ear of one friend, and of another, and another.”
So wrote St. Josemaría Escrivá in his spiritual classic The Way. Terse and succinct, it’s a truth that bears echoing, in season and out.
In times past, heretics dismissed the reality or eternity of hell: Universalism was their creed.
The poor man of Assisi is known in the Catholic world for many reasons and is probably one of the most cherished saints for many faithful. However, perhaps few know the event that marks its 800th anniversary this year: his meeting with the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.
As Pope Francis prepares to embark on his fourth trip to Asia in the seventh year of his pontificate, he is delivering in a big way on the promise he made shortly after his election that he would make Asia a key focus of his papacy.
When he appointed Filipino Cardinal Luis Tagle as head of Catholic aid agency Caritas Internationalis, the cardinal revealed that the Pope had told him he wanted an Asian in the position because “the future of the Church is in Asia.”
