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VELES, Macedonia (AP) -- On the second floor of a noisy sports center in the Macedonian town of Veles, a teenage purveyor of fake news cracked open his laptop and laid out his case for why lying is more lucrative than the truth....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. employers added a solid 178,000 jobs in November, reflecting the steady economy President-elect Donald Trump will inherit. The unemployment rate hit a nine-year low of 4.6 percent, though mainly because many people stopped looking for jobs and were no longer counted as unemployed....
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Europol warned Friday that the Islamic State group could launch fresh attacks in Europe in the near future, and the agency's director said police forces across the continent are investigating more than 50 terrorism cases....
AIN AL-JEHESH, Iraq (AP) -- On the road to Tal Afar, an Iraqi city near Syria that's been key to sectarian catastrophes in both countries over the past decade, a mosaic of rag-tag troops advancing against Islamic State militants have one symbol in common....
RIO NEGRO, Colombia (AP) -- An honor guard played taps early Friday as members of Colombia's military loaded five flight crew victims of an air crash that also killed most members of a soccer team onto a cargo plane for the trip back to their native Bolivia....
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- Tempers flared and political fault-lines were inflamed, as aides to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton gathered for their first meeting since Election Day....
(Vatican Radio) The United Nations says Russia has indicated it is ready to discuss opening four safe corridors to the besieged, rebel-held east of the Syrian city of Aleppo where more than a quarter of a million people are trapped, and injured people can't be reached. As residents revealed massive suffering, The UN's special advisor on Syria, Jan Egeland, said Russia appeared ready to open corridors to allow increasingly desperate civilians to flee rebel-held eastern Aleppo.Listen to the report by Stefan Bos: Egeland spoke to media amid reports that Russian-backed Syrian government forces have retaken more than a third of eastern Aleppo since the weekend. "The Russian Federation announced that...they want to sit down in Aleppo with our people there to discuss how we can use the four corridors to evacuate people out,” added Egeland, who also heads the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria. “We have at least 400 wounded that need immediate me...
(Vatican Radio) The United Nations says Russia has indicated it is ready to discuss opening four safe corridors to the besieged, rebel-held east of the Syrian city of Aleppo where more than a quarter of a million people are trapped, and injured people can't be reached.
As residents revealed massive suffering, The UN's special advisor on Syria, Jan Egeland, said Russia appeared ready to open corridors to allow increasingly desperate civilians to flee rebel-held eastern Aleppo.
Listen to the report by Stefan Bos:
Egeland spoke to media amid reports that Russian-backed Syrian government forces have retaken more than a third of eastern Aleppo since the weekend. "The Russian Federation announced that...they want to sit down in Aleppo with our people there to discuss how we can use the four corridors to evacuate people out,” added Egeland, who also heads the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria.
“We have at least 400 wounded that need immediate medical evacuation,” Egeland said, adding that there would also be discussions on using “these corridors to get medical supplies and food in.”
He added that conditions were now so dire that medical operations were being conducted without anaesthetics.
RESIDENTS DESPERATE
International aid can't come soon enough for residents such as 26-year-old Lina Shamy who spoke to the BBC network from inside eastern Aleppo. "All hospitals in the city are out of service. Civil defence and ambulance systems have lost more than half of their equipment," she said.
"Till yesterday night there were 35 civilians stuck under the wreckage. And ambulance systems and civil defence couldn't reach them. Also sometimes ambulance response happens on foot because there is no transportation and no [adequate] equipment," the resident added.
Without access to her and many others in the east, UN aid agencies are strengthening their presence in government-controlled western Aleppo.
Special adviser Egeland said the UN has enough food stored in the west to feed 150,000 people in the east, as well as medical supplies to cover their needs.
Some 27,000 people somehow managed to flee the east for government- and Kurdish-controlled areas since the weekend. But they are joining 400,000 long-term displaced people already in the west of the city.
Aleppo was once Syria's largest city and its commercial and industrial hub before the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. It has been divided in roughly two for the past four years. But observers say that in the past 11 months, Syrian troops have broken
the deadlock with the help of Iranian-backed militias and Russian air strikes, adding to rising death toll and more misery among the living.
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has sent a Message to mark the Calasanctian Jubilee Year – a special Jubilee marking the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Pious Schools, providing free education to the sons of the poor, and the Religious Order that ran them, commonly known as the Piarists, by St. Joseph Calasanctius (Joseph of Calasanz), Sch.P.The Calasanctian Jubilee Year opened on November 27 of 2016 in the church of San Pantaleo in Rome, with a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.The Jubilee Year will end on November 25 of 2017, with a Eucharistic celebration in San Pantaleo, presided by the Father General of the Congregation of Piarists, Fr. Pedro Aguado, Sch.P.Below, please find the full text of the Holy Father’s Message to mark the occasion******************************************To The Very Reverend Father PEDRO AGUADO CUESTAGeneral Super...
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has sent a Message to mark the Calasanctian Jubilee Year – a special Jubilee marking the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Pious Schools, providing free education to the sons of the poor, and the Religious Order that ran them, commonly known as the Piarists, by St. Joseph Calasanctius (Joseph of Calasanz), Sch.P.
The Calasanctian Jubilee Year opened on November 27 of 2016 in the church of San Pantaleo in Rome, with a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.
The Jubilee Year will end on November 25 of 2017, with a Eucharistic celebration in San Pantaleo, presided by the Father General of the Congregation of Piarists, Fr. Pedro Aguado, Sch.P.
Below, please find the full text of the Holy Father’s Message to mark the occasion
******************************************
To The Very Reverend Father PEDRO AGUADO CUESTA
General Superior of the Piarist Fathers
With great joy I address you and all the Piarist brothers on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Pious Schools as a Religious Congregation and of the 250th anniversary of the canonization of St. Joseph Calasanz. On this happy occasion I also want to be present not only to celebrate the extraordinary history that you have written from the times of the Founder until today, but also to encourage you to continue it with enthusiasm, dedication and hope “for the glory of God and the usefulness of our neighbor” with the assurance that, although the circumstances in which the Order was born are not those of today, the needs it responds to remain essentially the same: children and young people need the distribution of the bread of piety and letters, the poor continue to call us and summon us, the society demands to be transformed according to the values of the Gospel, and the preaching of Jesus must be brought to all peoples and all nations.
Pope Paul V, 400 years ago, realized that it was the Holy Spirit who led Joseph of Calasanz to dedicate himself to the education of the children who at that time wandered in the streets of Rome, and for that reason he erected the “Pauline Congregation of the Poor of the Mother God of the Pious Schools” with the bull Ad ea per quae, as the first Congregation in the Church dedicated exclusively to the education of children and young people, especially the poorest. In the last century, Pius XII recognized the importance of his Founder, proclaiming him, on the occasion of the third centenary of his death and the second of his beatification, Heavenly Patron of all Christian public schools (Cf. Brief Providentissimus Deus: AAS 1948, 11, 454-455).
In these four centuries the Pious Schools have remained in a permanent attitude of openness to reality and of “going forth”: from Rome to the small Italian towns where their educational service was urgently requested; From Italy to European countries, where the Church wanted to solidly educate children in the Catholic faith; and later to other continents, to serve the Church and the world in the field of education. They have always exercised their ministry in school, but have been able to incarnate their charisma also in several other areas. And, at the same time, they have been able to respond to the requests of the Church, assuming pastoral services wherever necessary. Finally, in response to the wishes of Vatican II, which called for a more active participation of the laity in the life of the Church, they have opened the way for the Piarist Fraternities, inviting men and women of good will to share their charism and their mission, fostering a rich variety of vocations.
Since Calasanz began his educational activities, in 1597, until the Church erected the Congregation, twenty years passed, twenty intense years in which his identity was being shaped. On the anniversary we celebrate and you will live as Calasanctian Jubilee Year, I hope you will remember what you are and what you are called to be. I ask the Lord to grant you to live those dispositions that made your Founder a saint. In this way, the Pious Schools will be what San Calasanz wanted and what children and young people need.
I invite you to live this Jubilee Year as a new “Pentecost of the Piarists”. May the common house of the Pious Schools be filled with the Holy Spirit, so that the communion necessary to carry forward the mission of the Piarists in the world, surpassing the fears and barriers of all kinds, will be created. That your people, communities and works can radiate in all languages, places and cultures the liberating and saving force of the Gospel. May the Lord help you to always have a missionary spirit and readiness to get on the road.
The motto you have chosen for this Jubilee Year – To educate, Announce, To transform - guides and gives you directions. Remain open and attentive to the promptings of the Spirit. Above all, follow the traces that children and young people carry written in their eyes. Look at their faces and let them contaminate you by their brightness to be bearers of future and hope. May God grant you to be prophetically present in the corners where children suffer unjustly.
Today more than ever we need an evangelizing pedagogy capable of changing the heart and reality in harmony with the Kingdom of God, making people protagonists and participants in the process. Christian education, especially among the poorest and where the Good News has little place or touches life marginally, is a privileged means to achieve this goal. In an educational charisma such as yours, enormous potentialities are perceived, many of which are yet to be discovered. Education opens the possibility of understanding and welcoming the presence of God in the heart of every human being, from the earliest childhood, making use of human (“letters”) and divine (“piety”) knowledge. Only the coherence of a life based on this love will make you fruitful and fill you with children.
I want to remember the strong words with which your founder described the ministry to which he dedicated his life: “Very dignified, very noble, very praiseworthy, very beneficial, very useful, very necessary, deeply rooted in our nature, very appreciated, very pleasant and very glorious” (Memorial to Cardinal Tonti). These words are still valid! In fact, today there are millions of children without access to education, excluded in big cities, limited in their aspirations and plans for the future due to human selfishness and greed; thousands of children away from their homes and their schools due to wars, and requiring special educational attention. And all school children are continually in need of true teachers, to help them grow from deep roots, to show them Christ and to accompany them on the journey of life.
I do not want to stop saying one thing that I feel with particular force when I think about consecrated life. Being part of a religious family for Saint Joseph Calasanz meant choosing a path of continuous and marked abasement. Being Piarist is being, by definition, a person in a low state, a small one that can be identified with the small, a poor with the poor. The history of our salvation is the story of a supreme abasement: the divine becomes human, the celestial becomes terrestrial, the eternal becomes temporary, the absolute becomes fragile, the wisdom of God becomes madness and his strength becomes weakness; because Life, the true Life, is humbled to death, and death on the cross. To follow Jesus is to follow his abasement, to come, as He, to the bottom of humanity, of our weakness, and there to become a servant, as the One who did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for all Cf. Mt 20, 28).
St. Joseph of Calasanz said: “The shortest and easiest way to be exalted to self-knowledge and from this to the attributes of mercy, prudence and infinite patience of God, is to descend to give light to children and particularly to those who are the most helpless, because being this a trade so low and vile in the eyes of the world, few want to humiliate to it. (Epistolary, 1236). Your Founder discovered that the true path of self-knowledge and the exercise of the highest virtues was the abasement in front of children, especially to the most abandoned, to bring them to light. In the same way that the Lord wanted to put true happiness and joy in the baseness of the cross, you, as consecrated persons, should find your fullness and joy in the daily abasement among children and young people, especially the poorest and needy. You have not been founded for another greatness than that of smallness, or to any other summit than that of the abasement, which dresses you with the feelings of Christ and leads you to be cooperators of the Divine Truth and to become children with children and poor with the poor (cf. Constitutions, 19).
I entrust all of you, the Order, the Calasanctian Family and the Piarist Fraternities to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose name the Order of the Pious Schools bears. Mary, who was the first teacher of Jesus, is your model and protection to continue carrying out your mission, accompanying the little ones towards the Kingdom of God.
With these sentiments, I impart a special Apostolic Blessing to all of you. From the Vatican, November 27, 2016
Discalced Carmelites marked 400 years of their arrival in Asia with a Mass in the ruins of their ancient monastery in Goa on Nov. 29 the feast day of their first martyrs, Blessed Dionysius and Redemptus.Some 20 priests concelebrated Mass inside a make-shift shed at the ruins, which was once the center of Carmelite missionaries in Asia. The site largely unknown to locals, has tombs of significant personalities of royal families and Carmelite friars.Fr Charles Serrao OCD, provincial of the Karnataka-Goa province of the Carmelites was the main celebrant and Fr Sylvestre D'Souza OCD, councillor for spirituality delivered the homily.Fr Leander of the Annunciation, a native of Burgos in Spain, contacted authorities in Goa for the purpose of setting up a foundation in the state. Without much difficulty, Fr Leander was able to secure a temporary license from Archbishop Don Cristobal de Sa Lisboa. The Carmelites landed in 1616 in Old Goa, the ancient Po...
Discalced Carmelites marked 400 years of their arrival in Asia with a Mass in the ruins of their ancient monastery in Goa on Nov. 29 the feast day of their first martyrs, Blessed Dionysius and Redemptus.
Some 20 priests concelebrated Mass inside a make-shift shed at the ruins, which was once the center of Carmelite missionaries in Asia. The site largely unknown to locals, has tombs of significant personalities of royal families and Carmelite friars.
Fr Charles Serrao OCD, provincial of the Karnataka-Goa province of the Carmelites was the main celebrant and Fr Sylvestre D'Souza OCD, councillor for spirituality delivered the homily.
Fr Leander of the Annunciation, a native of Burgos in Spain, contacted authorities in Goa for the purpose of setting up a foundation in the state. Without much difficulty, Fr Leander was able to secure a temporary license from Archbishop Don Cristobal de Sa Lisboa. The Carmelites landed in 1616 in Old Goa, the ancient Portuguese capital, which also served as the center of Portuguese mission to the rest of Asia in the 17th century.
The archbishop and viceroy contributed to the construction of a magnificent church which was inaugurated on April 25, 1620 and completed in 1621. Today, one can see the ruins of the first foundation Carmelite monastery at this place, where over 100 friars were trained.
It is recalled that Blessed Redemptus, a Portuguese soldier, joined the Carmelites to be a non-clerical Carmelite brother through a profession of vows in 1635 at Old Goa. The other was Fr Dionysius, a French sailor and a cartographer, who was admitted into the novitiate at Old Goa in the year 1635.
When the ambassador, Francis D'Souza was to leave for the East Indies on the request of the government, his superiors allowed Fr Dionysius to go along with the diplomatic mission sent by the viceroy to the sultan of Acheh in the East Indies. He was accompanied by Redemptus of the Cross.
While the ambassador and his troupe were released, Fr Dionysius and Redemptus were enslaved for some time, and subjected to torture before they were martyred on November 29, 1638.
These first martyrs of the Teresian Carmel were beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1900.
Vatican Weekend for December 3, 2016 features a report on the General Audience, a reflection on the Church’s English martyrs whom we remember each December, plus a spiritual reflection for this holy month of the Lord’s birth. The programme ends with a musical meditation marking the 2nd Sunday of Advent and a segment celebrating the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady…Listen to this programme produced and presented by Tracey McClure:
Vatican Weekend for December 3, 2016 features a report on the General Audience, a reflection on the Church’s English martyrs whom we remember each December, plus a spiritual reflection for this holy month of the Lord’s birth. The programme ends with a musical meditation marking the 2nd Sunday of Advent and a segment celebrating the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady…
Listen to this programme produced and presented by Tracey McClure:
