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(Vatican Radio) At his General Audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis began a new series of catecheses on “Christian Hope”.

In our times, which seem so dark, the Pope said we often feel “lost in the face of the wickedness and the violence that surround us.” We may even feel “discouraged, because we feel powerless, and it seems the darkness might never end.”

But we should never give up hope, he continued, “because God, with His love, journeys with us, He does not leave us alone, and the Lord Jesus has overcome evil, and opened up the path of life.”

It is important to reflect on hope during this season of Advent, when we prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas. Pope Francis based his reflection primarily on a passage from Isaiah, in which God tells the prophet, first, to console his people, and then to “make straight the path of the Lord.”

This prophetic message was addressed to the people of Israel when they were living the tragedy of the exile in Babylon, when they had been taken out of their own land and deprived of their freedom and dignity, and even their trust in God. But the call of the prophet, the Pope said, “opens their hearts anew to faith.” It is precisely in the desert that they hear his call, it is precisely there that a new journey “can be made in order to return not only to their homeland, but to God.”

This passage, Pope Francis continued, was the starting point for the preaching of John the Baptist, “a voice crying out in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord.” In Jesus time, the Israelites were once again living a kind of exile, living as strangers in their own land because of the oppression of the Romans. But it was not the powerful who made history, the Pope continued; rather, history is the story of what God has done together with his little ones, people like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary, and the shepherds, the simple, humble people who gathered around Jesus at his birth. “These are the little ones,” Pope Francis said, made great by their faith,” the little ones who know that they must keep hope alive.

“Let us allow ourselves, then,” the Pope concluded, “to teach hope, to faithfully await the coming of the Lord, and whatever desert we might have in our life will become a flowering garden.”

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Rome, Italy, Dec 7, 2016 / 03:02 am (CNA).- For American composer J.J. Wright, the Second Vatican Council's call to inculturate the Church's ancient musical traditions into “mission territory” – while preserving its unity – is something he has adopted personally with one of his greatest passions: jazz.

Referring to Vatican II's documents, Wright told CNA that when people go to a new culture for the sake of evangelization, “one of the ways you can (evangelize) is by incorporating into the Western-European traditions of the faith, the native traditions.”  

He said that for him, the United States could arguably be called “mission territory,” since the culture is “definitely not like a Catholic culture.” Because of this, “I see one of the ways of evangelization through sacred music.”

When the Second Vatican Council's constitution on the Sacred Liturgy “Sacrosanctum Concilium” was published, it asked that provisions revising liturgical texts allow “for legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions and peoples, especially in mission lands, provided that the substantial unity of the Roman rite is preserved; and this should be borne in mind when drawing up the rites and devising rubrics.”

In paragraph 119, the document noted that “in certain parts of the world, especially mission lands, there are peoples who have their own musical traditions, and these play a great part in their religious and social life.”

Because of this, “due importance is to be attached to their music, and a suitable place is to be given to it, not only in forming their attitude toward religion, but also in adapting worship to their native genius.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' document “Sing to the Lord” expresses a similar request, saying that “every bishop, pastor and liturgical musician...should be sensitive to the cultural and spiritual milieu of their communities, in order to build up the Church in unity and peace.”
 
Wright said that for him, making sacred music sound familiar to peoples' own individual and cultural realities opens “a lens into the deeper tradition.” While he finds the merge between jazz and sacred music to be an expression of his own faith, it's “not meant to define sacred music.”

“It's more like I'm speaking their language so that they can find a way in.”

Wright is an American pianist, conductor and composer who holds Masters of Sacred Music from the University of Notre Dame and was previously a member of the United States Naval Academy Band.

During his time in the Navy, Wright collaborated with well-known jazz vibraphonist Dave Samuels on a Latin-jazz CD that ended up winning a Grammy.

He is currently working on his doctorate, and for the 2016-2017 academic year is living and studying in Rome while he writes his dissertation and interns with the Sistine Chapel Choir.

In addition to his studies, Wright has just released a new CD called “O Emmanuel,” which is the first of his projects that features both jazz and sacred music as part of the same project.

While not all of the songs have the jazz element, Wright said the CD is meant to follow a spiritual journey that “encompasses the whole tradition of sacred music from chant to polyphony, up through modern music and jazz.”

Though the new CD is his first larger attempt at joining jazz and the tradition of sacred music, Wright said he would be willing to write a jazz Mass should he ever have the opportunity.

Prominent names in the world of jazz such as Mary Lou William and Dave Brubeck have already written Masses in the style. William herself, a convert to Catholicism, performed her third Mass for Pope Paul VI in Rome in the early 1970s.

“One of the things I've been really cognizant of is that there are very strong opinions on both sides as to what types of music are appropriate for the liturgy,” Wright said, explaining that while a jazz Mass might be in his future, his new CD “is not liturgical.”

He said that his CD is “an experiment to test the waters and to see if this works,” adding that while it works for him as an artist in terms of being “an authentic expression of my faith” and to be “a really invigorating way to create art,” he is also open to how other people will respond.

Another unique element of the new CD is that it features the Notre Dame Children's Choir, which consists of Christian sacred music vocalists up to the age of 17.

As a project that's free and completely supported by the university, the choir is mean “to engage with people who don’t have as many privileges” in the area, such as immigrants and those who live in poverty.

The idea, Wright said, is to “create an environment where you can bring people from different backgrounds together in sacred music,” teaching them values such as inclusiveness.

In terms of how this vision relates to the CD, Wright said the choir’s director wanted the CD to be “a catalyst” for the greater mission of the choir, which focuses on how new music can “excite young people to want to build a great tradition of sacred music for now within the spirit of diversity and social justice.”

Wright said he can see his entire life's work as a sacred music artist involving this sort of partnership, “because it's a way to unite people in an extremely non-confrontational way.”

Another “really cool” aspect of jazz is that it opens the door for people, particularly children from different demographics, to come together.

“Our sacred music tradition is a white tradition, it's Western-European. That’s not a slight, that's just what it is,” he said, noting that jazz “is a predominantly black tradition and it’s the music of the African-American people that flourished through the 20th century and flourished through their oppression.”

What they were able to do is create “this incredible body of art that represented their struggles in our society,” Wright said, explaining that he sees jazz as a way to unite people from different backgrounds.

“Not only are the two different types of people coming together, the two music are coming together and they each have a home,” he said, adding that when people come together and build this type of “organic union of community, you can maybe break down” some of the barriers that might be separating them.

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Vatican City, Dec 7, 2016 / 04:13 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For Pope Francis, one of most needed virtues of modern time is hope, which is something he said must never be abandoned no matter how hard life gets, and which is often expressed in the simple act of a smile.

Referring to the “dramatic moment” of Israel’s exile in the desert, Pope Francis said Dec. 7 that this time was especially hard for the people because they had lost everything, and felt “abandoned and without hope.”

The desert is a difficult place to live, he said, but noted that it is precisely inside the desert that the people of Israel are able to walk in order to return “not only to their homeland, but to return to God, and to hope and smile again.”

“When we are in darkness and difficulty the smile doesn’t come, but there is the hope that teaches us to smile on that path to find God,” Francis said, noting that one of the trademarks of those who break away from God is “the absence of the smile, the smile of the hope of finding God.”

Perhaps these people know how to “have a good laugh” or make jokes, but they are missing the smile that only God knows how to give, the Pope continued.

Life, he said, “is often a desert, it’s hard to walk in it, but if we entrust ourselves to God it can become beautiful and wide like a highway.”

“It’s enough to never lose hope, it’s enough to continue to believe, always, despite everything,” he said, noting that often when we find ourselves in front of a child, “there is a spontaneous smile because a child is hope.”

“Let us also smile even if it was a difficult day, because we see the hope.”

Pope Francis spoke to the thousands of pilgrims present for his Wednesday general audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall.

After concluding his yearlong catechesis on mercy during the Jubilee, Francis began a new series on Christian hope, which he noted was timely given the fact that he started it during the Advent season.

Hope, he said, is needed “so much in these times that appear so dark, in which at times we feel lost in front of the evil and violence that surrounds us, in front of the pain of our brothers and sisters.”

Noting how many can feel lost, discouraged and even “powerless” in front of a darkness that seems like it will never end, the Pope stressed that “we mustn’t let hope abandon us, because God with his love walks with us, he doesn’t leave us alone,” but has instead “conquered evil and opened to us the path of life.”

Francis pointed to the words spoken by Isaiah in the days’ reading, taken from Chapter 40 of the Book of Isaiah when he prophet offers words of comfort and urges the people to prepare the way of Lord in the wilderness.

Pope Francis said that as a Father, God consoles his children by “raising up comforters” who are tasked with encouraging the people by announcing that their tribulation and pain is over, and that their sin has been forgiven.

“This is what heals the afflicted and frightened heart,” he said, adding that for the people, consolation begins with the possibility of walking along the path God carves out for them in the desert, which is a “new path, rectified and viable” which allows them to return to their homeland.

The people to whom Isaiah speaks were living “the tragedy of exile,” but now hear that they will be able to return to their homeland on a wide and level road, without the obstacles that often make the journey “arduous,” he said.

Preparing this path, Francis said, “means to prepare a path of salvation and liberation from every obstacle and stumbling block.”

When Isaiah says that he is the voice “of one crying out in the desert: prepare the way of the Lord,” the Pope noted that it’s a voice that seems to be crying out in a place where “no one is listening” and which mourns “the loss owed to the crisis of faith.”

However, he stressed that the true story is not the one made by the powerful who are seen by the world, “but rather the one made by God together with his little ones.”

Zechariah and Elizabeth were elderly and “marked by infertility,” and Mary was a young virgin betrothed to Joseph, while the shepherds who met the infant Jesus “were despised and didn’t count for anything,” the Pope observed.

“It is the small ones, made great by their faith, the little ones who know how to continue to hope,” he said, adding that it is they who are able to transform “the desert of exile, of desperate loneliness, of suffering, into a level road on which to walk to meet the glory of the Lord.”

“Let us therefore teach hope, let us look forward faithfully to the coming of the Lord and whatever the desert of our lives, it will become a flowery garden.”

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New Dehli, India, Dec 7, 2016 / 06:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A cloistered nun in India came out of her convent for an extraordinary reason: to attend a graduation ceremony for her doctorate in Aerospace Engineering.

“I had joined the religious order after my final oral exam last year, and this was the first time I came out after that. The rules of our order forbid us from going out of the convent, but I was given special permission to attend the convocation,” Sister Benedicta of the Holy Face told Matters India over the summer.

The 32-year-old nun lives in a cloistered convent of the Benedictine Sisters of the Reparation of the Holy Face.

Born in Kuwait before the Gulf War, Sister Benedicta studied at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai and then earned a Master’s degree in space science from Pune University, located 90 miles from Mumbai.

She earned her PhD from the Defense Institute of Advanced Technology in Pune. According to Matters India, her doctoral work in the field of aerospace engineering involved scramjet engines, which are used mainly for hyper-sonic vehicles and space vehicles.

Sister Benedicta had always felt a call to the consecrated life, but made the decision to become a nun after attending a spiritual retreat in Pune. She finished her doctorate studies before telling her family that she wanted to enter a cloistered convent.

The congregation of the Benedictine Sisters of the Reparation of the Holy Face was founded in 1950 by Venerable Abbot Hildebrand Gregory. In 1977, it became a pontifical congregation and has houses on several continents.

 

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Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, Dec 7, 2016 / 12:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A distant part of Ethiopia last week celebrated the baptisms of 300 adult catechumens, youth, and infants.

“Today when you receive this great Sacrament of Baptism you become sons and daughters of God, people of God and members of the Church; this brings great joy in heaven and great joy on earth for the entire Church,” Bishop Lesanu-Christos Matheos Semahun of the Bahir Dar-Dessie Ethiopian eparchy said in his Nov. 27 homily.

The newly baptized bore candles and lit them as a sign of Christ’s light, the Catholic News Agency for Africa reports.

“We know what we trust in,” they sang to a congregation of their families, clergy, vowed religious, catechists, and lay faithful.

Most of the newly baptized are of the Gumuz people, an ethnic group which mainly practices local traditional religions. They live in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, more than 100 miles southwest of Bahir Dar.

The bishop recounted how Christianity came to the village of Banush: a local young man named Takel told Church authorities about the village and asked them to evangelize.

“The testimony of one young believer and the diligent efforts of the pastoral agents of the Catholic Church have brought 300 more children of God home,” he said. “However, there are still more of our brothers and sisters who have not yet received the Good News of the Lord, and with God’s Grace we shall continue to shine the light of Our Lord and spread the Good News.”

Bishop Lesanu-Christos and the newly baptized are part of the Ethiopian Catholic Church, an Eastern Church in communion with Rome which uses the Alexandrian rite. The Eparchy of Bahir Dar-Dessie, established Jan. 19, 2015, is less than two years old.

“God is great, and God is a Father to all of us,” the bishop said in his homily. “We say the Our Father Prayer here and throughout the world and this proves that we are all children of one God who created everyone equally and with the same human dignity.”

The Catholic Church first reached the Gumuz people 15 years ago, thanks to the evangelism of three Comboni Sisters: Sr. Jamilety, Tilda, and Bertila.

Before Bishop Lesanu-Christos, along with six priests, baptized the 300, he blessed and installed a cross and a bell on the future site of a church at the request of locals. Others placed a cross at the community cemetery to signify the new Christian community.

In neighboring villages, there are more than 500 catechumens waiting for baptism.

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