In reflection ‘Learning Humility of Heart,’ Archbishop Reminds ‘Let us turn especially in this holy season to our Blessed Mother Mary’

Following is a Lenten reflection of Archbishop Josè Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, on ‘Learning Humility of Heart’.

This Lent, we want to try to enter more deeply into the mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ, to follow him more closely, to commit ourselves once more to making his life the pattern for our own.

Ash Wednesday begins the Catholic season of Lent, a time of examining our consciences, confessing and repenting our sins, and working to change the direction of our lives back toward God through prayer, self-sacrifice, and charitable acts to others.

The essential properties of marriage are unity and indissolubility.

Its unity consists in the fact that the husband cannot have another wife so long as his wife is alive, and the wife cannot have another husband so long as her husband is alive. These passages from the Scriptures confirm this understanding:

During his trip to Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong, the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda Fide provided some useful clarifications on the guidelines regarding the agreement on the nomination of Chinese bishops.

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?