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LONDON (AP) -- With Britain's membership in the European Union on the line, campaigners from the prime minister on down blanketed the country Wednesday trying to convert the undecided on the final day before the crucial vote....
NEW YORK (AP) -- The nasal spray version of the annual flu vaccine failed to protect kids again last year, the latest in a string of failures that has prompted an expert panel to recommend that doctors stop giving it to patients....
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Hillary Clinton pushed back against Donald Trump's questions about her religion and her competence Wednesday, casting him as a candidate with not much else to say about how he'd lead the nation....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A small plane with two sick U.S. workers left Antarctica on Wednesday in a daring rescue mission from a remote South Pole research station, officials said....
NEW YORK (AP) -- With the cameras it uses to cover Congress shut off, C-SPAN turned to social media feeds on Wednesday to beam live coverage of the House Democrat's sit-in to demand votes on gun control legislation...
NEW YORK (AP) -- Donald Trump launched a blistering attack Wednesday on Hillary Clinton's record and character, slamming his presidential rival as a "world class liar" who raked in personal profits from her tenure at the State Department. The billionaire businessman claimed, "She gets rich making you poor."...
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rebellious Democrats shut down the House's legislative work on Wednesday, staging a sit-in on the House floor and refusing to leave until they secured a vote on gun control measures before lawmakers' weeklong break....
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has sent a video message to the people of Armenia, ahead of his visit to the country this weekend. In the message – delivered in Italian – the Holy Father says, “[It is] as a servant of the Gospel and a messenger of peace [that] I desire to come among you, to support [your] every effort towards peace – and I would share our steps on the pathway of reconciliation, which generates hope.”https://youtu.be/GgjJB0hG6JwVatican Radio’s English translation of the full text of the video message is here below****************************************Dear Brothers and Sisters,In a few days I will have the joy to be with you, in Armenia. Even now, I invite you to pray for this Apostolic journey.With the help of God, I come among you to fulfil, as the motto of the trip says, a “visit to the first Christian country”. I come as a pilgrim, in this Jubilee Year, to draw on the ancient wisdom of your people and to steep mysel...
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has sent a video message to the people of Armenia, ahead of his visit to the country this weekend. In the message – delivered in Italian – the Holy Father says, “[It is] as a servant of the Gospel and a messenger of peace [that] I desire to come among you, to support [your] every effort towards peace – and I would share our steps on the pathway of reconciliation, which generates hope.”
https://youtu.be/GgjJB0hG6Jw
Vatican Radio’s English translation of the full text of the video message is here below
****************************************
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
In a few days I will have the joy to be with you, in Armenia. Even now, I invite you to pray for this Apostolic journey.
With the help of God, I come among you to fulfil, as the motto of the trip says, a “visit to the first Christian country”. I come as a pilgrim, in this Jubilee Year, to draw on the ancient wisdom of your people and to steep myself the sources of your faith, which is steadfast as your famous crosses carved in stone.
I come to the mystical heights of Armenia as your brother, animated by the desire to see your faces, to pray with you and to share the gift of friendship. Your history and the events of your beloved people stir in me admiration and sorrow: admiration, for you have found in Jesus’ Cross and in your own wits, the wherewithal ever to pick yourselves up and start anew – even after sufferings that are among the most terrible in human memory; pain, for the tragedies that your fathers have lived in their flesh.
Let us not allow the painful memories to take possession of our hearts; even in the face of the repeated assaults of evil, let us not give ourselves up. Let us rather do as Noah, who, after the flood, never tired of looking to heaven and releasing the dove again and again, until one day it came back to him, bringing a tender olive leaf (Gen. 8:11): it was the sign that life could resume and [that] hope must rise.
As servant of the Gospel and a messenger of peace I desire to come among you, to support [your] every effort towards peace – and I would share our steps on the pathway of reconciliation, which generates hope.
May the great saints of your people, especially the Doctor of the Church, Gregory of Narek, bless our meetings, to which I look forward with tender longing. In particular, I look forward to embracing my Brother, Karekin, and, along with him, to give fresh impetus to our path towards full unity.
Last year, from several countries, you came to Rome, and at the tomb of St. Peter, we prayed together. Now I come to your blessed land to strengthen our communion, to advance along the path of reconciliation, and to allow ourselves together to be animated by hope.
(Vatican Radio) Among the many thousands of pilgrims and visitors at Pope Francis’ general audience on Wednesday was a group of young students from The Unity of Faiths Foundation football club, or TUFF FC as it’s known.Started in London as a way of bringing together people of many different religious, ethnic and social backgrounds, the foundation began by organizing music festivals with the support of local community leaders. Following on from those successful events, the foundation developed education programmes for schools and then set up the football team as a way of offering kids from underprivileged backgrounds an alternative to the gang culture that many of them are lured into.British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama have already endorsed the project and, knowing the Pope’s passion for football, the group came to the Vatican this week to seek his blessing too.Accompanying the kids was one of The Unity of Faiths ...
(Vatican Radio) Among the many thousands of pilgrims and visitors at Pope Francis’ general audience on Wednesday was a group of young students from The Unity of Faiths Foundation football club, or TUFF FC as it’s known.
Started in London as a way of bringing together people of many different religious, ethnic and social backgrounds, the foundation began by organizing music festivals with the support of local community leaders. Following on from those successful events, the foundation developed education programmes for schools and then set up the football team as a way of offering kids from underprivileged backgrounds an alternative to the gang culture that many of them are lured into.
British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama have already endorsed the project and, knowing the Pope’s passion for football, the group came to the Vatican this week to seek his blessing too.
Accompanying the kids was one of The Unity of Faiths co-founders, Dr Shamender Talwar, together with his daughter Kareena, a youth ambassador, and Ben Corbyn, in charge of sports development.
They talked to Philippa Hitchen about the way the organisation has grown and how it’s also now keeping kids away from the lure of online radicalization by extremist groups…
Listen:
Washington D.C., Jun 22, 2016 / 11:54 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With relics of two English martyrs currently touring the U.S., the Archbishop of Baltimore implored Catholics to follow their example by defending religious freedom.Speaking at the opening Mass of the annual “Fortnight for Freedom,” Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chair of the U.S. bishops’ ad hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, clarified that “we are not here tonight to argue a point of constitutional law nor are we here to re-argue what has already been persuasively argued in our courts.”“No, we are here to honor the martyrs, to celebrate the freedom to bear witness, beginning with Jesus Christ, ‘the faithful witness’ of the Father’s love, for Christ and his sacrificial love are the very heart of the Eucharist we celebrate.”The “Fortnight for Freedom” is an annual two-week period of prayer, fasting, and education for religious freedom, called for...
Washington D.C., Jun 22, 2016 / 11:54 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With relics of two English martyrs currently touring the U.S., the Archbishop of Baltimore implored Catholics to follow their example by defending religious freedom.
Speaking at the opening Mass of the annual “Fortnight for Freedom,” Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chair of the U.S. bishops’ ad hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, clarified that “we are not here tonight to argue a point of constitutional law nor are we here to re-argue what has already been persuasively argued in our courts.”
“No, we are here to honor the martyrs, to celebrate the freedom to bear witness, beginning with Jesus Christ, ‘the faithful witness’ of the Father’s love, for Christ and his sacrificial love are the very heart of the Eucharist we celebrate.”
The “Fortnight for Freedom” is an annual two-week period of prayer, fasting, and education for religious freedom, called for by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The fortnight begins on the eve of the feast of English martyrs Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher – whose relics are currently touring the U.S. – and ends on July 4, Independence Day.
More, chancellor of England, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, were beheaded by order of King Henry VIII because they would not honor him as head of the Church in England. “Both Fisher and More died not merely for freedom of conscience in the abstract but for freedom of conscience in defending marriage and the rights of the Church,” Archbishop Lori said.
Yet they, and martyrs throughout the centuries, followed Christ’s example of meekness and self-sacrifice, he noted.
“All these martyrs faced unjust judgment yet responded truthfully and respectfully to their accusers,” he said, and they “re-produced in their own flesh the sacrificial death of Christ.”
Their witness to the Church’s teaching is an example for Catholics everywhere to defend freedom of religion, Archbishop Lori insisted, adding that Catholics should remember all the martyrs, particularly those of recent decades.
“We may think that the days of the martyrs have ended but as Pope Francis points out there are more martyrs for the faith in our times than there were during the first centuries of the Church,” Archbishop Lori said, noting Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant martyrs under Nazism and Communism that formed an “‘ecumenism of blood,’ as Pope Francis says.”
Recent years have seen the martyrdom of Christians in the Middle East and Africa, he continued.
Yet religious freedom is now under siege even in the U.S., he said, noting threats like “the HHS mandate which seeks to force religious employers to provide in their employee health insurance plans so-called services contrary to deeply held teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Other threats include the marginalization of or legal action against people in fields of medicine, business, or charitable work because they obey their consciences and “uphold traditional marriage” or another Church teaching, he said.
“Let us indeed ‘read the signs of the times’ as we witness what Pope Francis calls a ‘polite persecution’ going on all around us,” the archbishop added.
He acknowledged that these threats “pale in comparison to those faced by our brothers and sisters in many parts of the world,” but then asked “who is served” by disregarding these threats. “Surely not those who remain strong in their witness in the face of violence and death!”
Christians in the U.S. might not be martyrs, but will have to uphold Church teaching in the face of an increasingly hostile secularism, he warned.
“We may not be called upon to shed our blood but we are called upon to defend our freedoms not merely in the abstract but as embedded in matters such as immigration, marriage, and the Church’s teaching on sexuality.”
When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, he was not a “rabble-rouser seeking confrontation with the state,” the archbishop said. Rather, Jesus was “the very personification of the Beatitudes he once proclaimed on the mountainside.”
He was “in the sovereign freedom of the Father’s love: poor in spirit with few possessions and no visible means of defense; full of sorrow and anguish for our sins; meek and mild, the Lamb of God, seeking only the Father’s will; a man of singlehearted love who came to bring us the peace of God’s kingdom, and who was now being persecuted for the sake of righteousness.”
“No decision Pilate could render would deter Him from his mission. Caesar could not touch the things of God,” he said. Christians must live this same freedom of spirit, he insisted, if we wish to be catalysts of peace and justice in our land.”
Christians must be witnesses to the freedom of Christ and the martyrs, “by loving and praying for those who engage in violent persecution, as well as those who seek to limit our ministries and curtail our freedoms at home.”
“We know not what the future holds, but let us approach it as Jesus would, with ‘heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience’,” he concluded. “If we do so, then, no matter happens, we shall truly be free!”
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