The "Faith" Institute reports that last year more than 48,000 Catholics were baptized. A partial figure, which, however, seems to mark a trend reversal when compared to the analyses that claimed a reduction in the celebrations within Chinese communities between 2010 and 2014.
In my memoirs “Jerusalemites... a Living Memory”, I made reference to Talbiya Quarter in West Jerusalem, which in the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, was the most fashionable Christian Arab quarter, outside the Old City, along with Qatamon and Upper and Lower Baqa.
They had been a thriving, sophisticated and cohesive community of Arab Palestinian Christians, numerically roughly on par with their Arab Muslim compatriots, and living side by side in neighbourly amity and friendship.
I know many of those families and had close friendships with them.
Pope Francis has called for a ‘revolution of tenderness.’
What does the Pope mean by this? And how does tenderness relate to the message of the gospel? What does a ‘theology of tenderness,’ as the pope puts it, look like?
Child soldiers, men and women tortured and persecuted. Poor, hungry, orphaned. Wars and bombs dropped like candy. What a bad scenario the world of today presents. “I don’t think our times are better than those of the flood; I don’t think so. Calamities are more or less the same; the victims are more or less the same”, Francis says in todays’ Santa Marta mass.
Let us meditate on the words of Jesus who today tells us: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way. But woe to you who are rich, for you, have received your consolation.
The Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem reflects on the meeting between the Pope and the Great Imam in the United Arab Emirates: now we must transmit that spirit to the people.
The new president of the Federation of Bishops’ Conferences of the “continent of continents” relaunches the proclamation of the Gospel in the face of injustice and conflict, according to Pope Francis’ Magisterium.
The Indian Church will soon have a new saint: Blessed Maria Teresa Chiramel Mankidiyan, foundress of the congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family. Msgr. James Pazhayattil, bishop of Irinjalakuda [deceased in 2016], said: "She is like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Apart from the fact that they share the name, they have in common not only having founded a religious congregation - one the Missionaries of Charity, the other the Sisters of the Holy Family - but above all they have distinguished themselves for the service for the disadvantaged : poor, sick, marginalized, dying ".
“Hunger has no present or future. Only the past”: a phrase that must not be a “slogan but a truth”. The Pope said so by inaugurating the IFAD governing council at the meeting that took place at the headquarters of the United Nations agency for food and agriculture (FAO). Francis - who next October convened a Synod on the Amazon in the Vatican - then met a delegation of indigenous peoples from Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific.
Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin appeared 18 times to Bernadette Soubirous, a little 14-year-old shepherd girl.
On March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, Our Lady told Bernadette: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” This declaration, whose meaning St. Bernadette did not understand, came as a sort of confirmation of the recent proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception that Pope Pius IX had solemnly defined four years earlier, on December 8, 1854.
