‘You can make a better world,’ Pope tells disadvantaged children

This morning the “Ode to Joy” rang out from a teenaged orchestra as Pope Francis entered a room packed with 400 Italian school children from disadvantaged homes. They waved and cheered as the Pope spoke to them in simple terms about the importance of light and love in a dark world.

Today’s meeting was the second of its kind, a collaboration between the Pontifical Council for Culture’s “Court of the Gentiles” and Trenitalia, the Italian train company which sponsored the children’s ride from Naples to Rome.

Pope Francis’ encounter with the school children, who came from Naples as well as outlying areas of Rome, was marked by a joyful informality as he continued his simple question and answer style.

“Is it possible to make a better world?” he asked the children gathered in the atrium of the Paul VI hall on May 31, as they shouted “yes!” in reply.

“Yes! And better than the world I live in?” Pope Francis continued, as his young audience again shouted, “yes!”

“Yes. And to make a better world, how do we do it? With hate? Do we make it with hate?”

Some children stood up out of their chairs to shout, “no!”

Unemployed Remembered in Pope’s June Prayer Intentions

Also Prays Europe Can Rediscover Its Christian Roots

Pope Francis’ prayer intentions for June focus on unemployment as well as evangelization in Europe.

Yesterday, the Apostleship of Prayer announced the intentions chosen by the Pope for June.

The Pope’s general intention is “that the unemployed may support and find the work they need to live in dignity.”

For his mission intention, the Holy Father prays “that Europe may rediscover its Christian roots through the witness of believers.”

Sea of Galilee centre to provide reflection space for tourists in northern Israel

Holy sites in Jerusalem are crowded on top of each other, fighting for space and attention amid crowds of souvenir sellers and falafel shops. But up north, near the Sea of Galilee, the sites where Jesus performed his miracles are spread out among nature next to the gentle waves of the lake.
On Wednesday, Legionary Fr. Juan Maria Solana of Mexico dedicated a spirituality center on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that will create a space for pilgrims to reflect during their journey in the Holy Land. The spirituality center is part of an enormous project called the Magdala Center, believed to be located at the biblical home of Mary of Magdalene, which will eventually include an archaeological park, a 300-person hotel, a women’s institute, a restaurant and a multimedia center.

Solana originally purchased the land to build a retreat near the area of Migdal, a biblical fishing village and home to Mary (Migdal is the name of a nearby modern Jewish town, as well). The site he eventually purchased was close to the areas where Jesus visited, and that was enough, he reasoned.

But then archeological surveys, which are required by the state of Israel before construction, unearthed evidence of a building believed to be a synagogue from around the year A.D. 40. A row of stores near the synagogue led archaeologists Dina Avshalom-Gorni and Arfan Najar, both from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, to conclude that this area probably had been a city center.

Rather than be close to the town of Migdal, the site could actually be the biblical Migdal, they told Solana.

“The graffiti on Bethlehem wall was a message for the Pope”

The activist Habashi who wrote the message says he wanted the Pope to know how the Palestinians are suffering

Thirty three years, five of which were spent in Israeli prisons, the house in the Aida refugee camp and Yasser Arafat his model: Mohammed Lofti, also known as Habashi, is the Al Fatah militant who wrote the pro-Palestinian messages on Bethlehem’s Western Wall, where Francis stood to pray.

Sat in a restaurant near the Al Fatah training centre, Habashi describes that day as a duel with the Israelis which they won. “We knew that on Sunday the Pope was going to enter Bethlehem from the northern side of the Western Wall so the previous night, after midnight, we went to write the messages on the wall.” He used the plural to refer to a small group of people: There was three of us and I was coordinating.” But on Saturday evening the Israeli guards at the checkpoint spotted the messages and removed them the morning after. “In the morning we saw them removing them. We were tempted to go back and write them again straightaway but they would have removed them.” So they came up with a different plan. “We hung around without doing anything and then, when the Pope left Bethlehem and headed for the northern end of the wall, we quickly wrote the messages again so the Israelis didn’t have time to remove them.” Basically, it was a blitz. When the Pope’s car stopped “more or less where security had told us it would”, Habashi was nearby. “It was a powerful feeling, the Pope had seen our messages.”

Ascension/Seventh Sunday of Easter A

Reading I: Acts 1:1-11 (Ascension) or Acts 1:12-14 (7th Sunday)
Responsorial Psalm 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9 or Psalm 27:1, 4, 7-8
Reading II: Ephesians 1:17-23 or 1 Peter 4:13-16
Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20 or John 17:1-11A

Now this is eternal life,
that they should know you, the only true God,
and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ. (Gospel, 7th Sunday)

God’s Quiet Presence in Our Lives

The poet, Rumi, submits that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not.

That can be very helpful in understanding our faith. One of the reasons why we struggle with faith is that God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, something impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence, much to our frustration and loss of patience sometimes, is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash.

Because we are not sufficiently aware of this, we tend to misunderstand the dynamics of faith and find ourselves habitually trying to ground our faith on precisely something that is loud and dramatic. We are forever looking for something beyond what God gives us. But we should know from the very way God was born into our world, that faith needs to ground itself on something that is quiet and undramatic. Jesus, as we know, was born into our world with no fanfare and no power, a baby lying helpless in the straw, another child among millions. Nothing spectacular to human eyes surrounded his birth. Then, during his ministry, he never performed miracles to prove his divinity; but only as acts of compassion or to reveal something about God. Jesus never used divine power in an attempt to prove that God exists, beyond doubt. His ministry, like his birth, wasn’t an attempt to prove God’s existence. It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and that God loves us unconditionally.

Prayer is the key to building bridges, Pope tells German Catholics

German Catholics are meeting in Regensburg from May 28 to June 1 for Katholikentag, a gathering held 99 times since 1848. The theme of this year’s meeting, which includes some 1,000 events, is “building bridges with Christ.”

In his message for the occasion, dated May 23 and released on May 30, Pope Francis said that Christ is the bridge among peoples and the bridge between God and man. In the “bloody century” that saw World War I and subsequent wars, walls grew in hearts, and the Berlin Wall was built. As people prayed regularly for peace, the Berlin Wall fell.

Sudan: Daddy Daniel embraces little Maya

Meriam remains in prison after the birth of her baby girl on 27 May. Another similar case has now emerged: a 37-year-old woman has been arrested for “apostasy”

Meriam’s husband, Daniel, was able to embrace his newborn daughter but did little to alleviate his concern about his wife’s fate. Meriam was sentenced to death for refusing to give up the Christian faith and little Maya was born in prison in the early hours of 27 May.

The President of Italians for Darfur, Antonella Napoli, managed to speak to Maya’s father yesterday. “He is happy but his concern for his wife’s fate clouded the joy of his second daughter’s birth. He asked me to thank and greet all those Italians who are supporting the campaign for Meriam’s release,” she said.

“Maya is well but she is not free. Like Martin, her little brother who has been in prison with his mother since February,” Mrs. Napoli wrote on Twitter, where she also posted the first photo of the little girl, urging people once again to sign the petition that will be sent to the government of Sudan to try to obtain Meriam’s release. The date of the new trial could be announced by the end of June.

Figures on Church life are out: Faithful are growing fastest in Africa

This year’s Pontifical Yearbook has published the figures relating to the life of the Catholic Church around the world, in the first year of Francis’ pontificate. Asia ranks first in terms of the rise in seminarian numbers

The Pontifical Yearbook has published all figures relating to Church life around the world. The volume is published annually and collects together data from the Holy See’s central offices. This year’s figures are of particular interest because they refer to the first year of Francis’ pontificate. He was elected Pope on 13 March 2013. The figures relating to the “official” life of the Church – the legal-institutional aspect that is – include the period that runs from March last year to 22 February 2014. Two new episcopal sees, an eparchy, an apostolic exarchate and an archiepiscopal exarchate were established in this period and a territorial prelature was elevated to the status of diocese.

The data regarding faithful and other members of the Church refer to 2012, so there is a two year gap between that date and the date of publication. The Catholic Church is currently divided into 2981 ecclesiastical districts, dioceses or other kinds of institutions. The number of people who are being baptized is constantly growing. In the period between 2005 and 2012, the number of baptized people around the world rose from 1115 to 1229 million, an increase of 10, 2%.