On the occasion of International Women’s Day which falls on March 8th, Nadine Bitar from the Catechetical Office of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, shares with us how people today can reflect on the important characteristics of some of the female figures in the Bible.
“She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future.”
Proverbs 31:25
In Christianity, our will isn’t for the sake of our own choices, but to become united with will of the Father.
The roving Israelites learned it the hard way, the early Christians were martyred for it, and Catholics are getting heavy doses of it today. Like an encroaching jungle, the worship of idols and false gods are humanity’s default position whenever healthy Judeo-Christian institutions and traditions are not in place to keep this spiritually malignant vegetation from taking over.
“On March 2, 1939, Eugenio Pacelli became the 260th Pope. Some journalists described him as the last representative of the Church anchored in the past, emphasizing only the discontinuities with his holy successor. However, Pius XII is still a personality to be studied, and this will be facilitated by the opening of the Vatican archives on his pontificate,” said Andrea Tornielli, in an editorial published by “Vatican News” and l’Osservatore Romano in Italian on March 3, 2019.
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.
