Catholic News 2
BEIRUT (AP) -- The Syrian government and rebels evacuated more than 7,000 people from four besieged towns Friday in the latest coordinated population transfer in Syria's six-year-long civil war....
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) -- President Donald Trump's tweets are adding fuel to a "vicious cycle" of tensions on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea's vice foreign minister told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Friday. The official added that if the U.S. shows any sign of "reckless" military aggression, Pyongyang is ready to launch a pre-emptive strike of its own....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon officials say the U.S. commander in Afghanistan who ordered use of the "mother of all bombs" didn't need President Donald Trump's approval....
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A strike by the largest non-nuclear weapon ever used in combat by the U.S. military killed 36 Islamic State group militants and left no civilian casualties, hitting a tunnel complex in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Friday....
An Indian Salesian priest is among 13 new consultors Pope Francis appointed on Wednesday to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communication. Fr. Peter Gonsalves, S.D.B., dean of the Faculty of Social Communication Sciences of Rome’s Pontifical Salesian University, is among 6 priests and 7 lay people, including a woman, who will advise the recently-created communications body. The Pope established the new dicastery or office of the Secretariat for Communication in June, 2015, bringing 9 Vatican media bodies under the Secretariat’s direction, headed by Msgr. Dario Viganò, with the purpose of overhauling and streamlining them as a cohesive unit. The consultors are a separate group from the secretariat members, made up of 16 cardinals, bishops and laypeople the Pope appointed last year..A member of the Salesian province of Mumbai, Fr. Gonsalves is the first non-European Dean of Faculty of Social Communication Science...
An Indian Salesian priest is among 13 new consultors Pope Francis appointed on Wednesday to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communication. Fr. Peter Gonsalves, S.D.B., dean of the Faculty of Social Communication Sciences of Rome’s Pontifical Salesian University, is among 6 priests and 7 lay people, including a woman, who will advise the recently-created communications body.
The Pope established the new dicastery or office of the Secretariat for Communication in June, 2015, bringing 9 Vatican media bodies under the Secretariat’s direction, headed by Msgr. Dario Viganò, with the purpose of overhauling and streamlining them as a cohesive unit. The consultors are a separate group from the secretariat members, made up of 16 cardinals, bishops and laypeople the Pope appointed last year..
A member of the Salesian province of Mumbai, Fr. Gonsalves is the first non-European Dean of Faculty of Social Communication Sciences which was established in 1988. He was born in Mumbai on January 3th, 1958. He has been a Salesian since December 1977. He was ordained priest on December 19th, 1987. He holds the titles of Master of Philosophy and Bachelor of Arts from the Indian University of Pune and a Bachelor of Theology from Kristu Jyoti College in Bangalore. He received his PhD in Social Communication at the Salesian Pontifical University in 2007. In the previous years, he had also obtained a diploma in Counselling (Xavier's Institute, Mumbai 1988) and a diploma in Media Education (British Film Institute - Open University, London 2003).
He started teaching in 1981 in India, where he founded the Don Bosco Creativity Workshops in Mumbai and where he was the National Coordinator for Social Communications from 1993 to 1999. From 2005 to 2009, he also served as president of INTERSIG, the international wing of SIGNIS, a world association of communicators for a culture of peace.
He was in Italy from 2002 to 2006 as a coordinator of a 5-language web portal of the Salesians of Don Bosco at the Generalate in Rome. He began teaching at the UPS in 2008, was co-opted as a lecturer that same year and promoted to associate professor on 24 May 2013.
Fr. Gonsalves is author of three outstanding academic publications on the father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi. His first, “Clothing for Liberation: A Communication Analysis of Gandhi’s Swadeshi Revolution”, is the first analysis of Gandhi’s dressing style in terms of communication theory and an exploration of the subliminal messages that were subtly communicated to a large audience. His second book, “Khadi: Gandhi’s Mega Symbol of Subversion,” investigates the power of a symbol to qualitatively transform society, studying Gandhi’s use of clothing as a metaphor for unity, empowerment and liberation from imperial subjugation. Fr Gonsalves’ third work, “Gandhi and the Popes”, investigates how India’s freedom movement leader, whether in his lifetime or posthumously, was respected, appreciated and, in one case, imitated by the Popes from Pius XI to Francis. In the process, he “explores and assesses the popular claim that Gandhi was influenced by Christ, and the not so popular conjecture that Pope Francis was influenced by Gandhi.”
Fr. Gonsalves began his career in media as media education trainer in 1984 and a community worker for rural development at the Bosco Gramin Vikas Kendra, Ahmednagar. In 1992 he founded Tej-Prasarini, a multimedia production and training centre to raise awareness of the urgency of life-based education in vernacular marathi language of Maharashtra state. Later in 1994, Tejprasarini was shifted to Matunga, Mumbai where it is a flourishing media and training house of the Salesians of South Asia. The Salesian priest promoted a series of teacher-training manuals called ‘Quality Life Education’, the first of which was his own work: Exercises in Media Education (1994). Using this, he conducted no less than 40 all-India courses on media education for schoolteachers, social workers and youth facilitators from diverse ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds.
MIAMI (AP) -- The New York Mets' winning streak grew a lot longer Thursday....
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkey is heading toward a historic referendum on a new political system that could change the course of its history - and it has the country divided right down the middle....
In his Easter message to all the Catholic faithful and people of good will in Ethiopia, Cardinal Berhaneyesus Souraphiel, C.M., the Metropolitan Archbishop of Addis Ababa and President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Ethiopia (CBCE) has said that Easter is a time for Christians to reflect on the light that the Lord has granted to the world. He has also encouraged the faithful to refrain from the path of sin and instead follow Christ with faith and a life witness.“As King David tells us ‘I keep God before me always, for with him at my right hand, nothing can shake me’ (Ps 16:8).The Eternal God who is our protector will lead our path and we, His children, must give Him our hearts and our will completely,” the Cardinal said.The Cardinal also stressed that Easter is a time to exercise a spirit of charity towards others.“As the Apostle James tells us in his book (Jas 2:15-17) we must look around at our brothers and sisters who are less fortuna...
In his Easter message to all the Catholic faithful and people of good will in Ethiopia, Cardinal Berhaneyesus Souraphiel, C.M., the Metropolitan Archbishop of Addis Ababa and President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Ethiopia (CBCE) has said that Easter is a time for Christians to reflect on the light that the Lord has granted to the world. He has also encouraged the faithful to refrain from the path of sin and instead follow Christ with faith and a life witness.
“As King David tells us ‘I keep God before me always, for with him at my right hand, nothing can shake me’ (Ps 16:8).The Eternal God who is our protector will lead our path and we, His children, must give Him our hearts and our will completely,” the Cardinal said.
The Cardinal also stressed that Easter is a time to exercise a spirit of charity towards others.
“As the Apostle James tells us in his book (Jas 2:15-17) we must look around at our brothers and sisters who are less fortunate than us and see what their needs are. Let us offer them love, spiritual and material support and help them carry their burden so that they can also celebrate Easter joyfully. Only that way can we witness what our Lord has taught us on the Cross,” said Cardinal Berhaneyesus.
This Easter, Cardinal Berhaneyesus also has in mind the drought situation in Ethiopia which has caused widespread crop failures and has had a significant impact on water resources. The Cardinal stressed that Ethiopians support the government in the efforts to respond to the needs of drought-affected people.
The Cardinal said the faithful should pray, this Easter, for rain to bring relief to the drought in the country as well as for the many whose lives are threatened by the lack of water.
(Makeda Yohannes, Ethiopian Caholic Secretariat in Addis Ababa)
Email: engafrica@vatiradio.va
Rome, Italy, Apr 14, 2017 / 01:51 am (CNA).- In the hours after evening Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, a few pilgrims in Rome make their way to the Church of Saint Praxedes, home to a fragment of stone alleged to be the pillar upon which Jesus was scourged.Known as the Column of the Flagellation, the stone offers an object of contemplation for those visiting the church to reflect on Christ's Passion. This is especially true on Holy Thursday, when pilgrims traditionally go to churches throughout the city to venerate the decorated altars within which the Eucharist has been reposed in anticipation of Good Friday.The column is kept in a glass reliquary in one of the side chapels of Saint Praxedes, a 9th century church named after an early Christian martyr who has long-standing devotion in Rome, but about whom little is known for certain.The pillar itself, sculpted from black-and-white marble, was retrieved from the Holy Land during the medieval period.Is the artifac...
Rome, Italy, Apr 14, 2017 / 01:51 am (CNA).- In the hours after evening Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, a few pilgrims in Rome make their way to the Church of Saint Praxedes, home to a fragment of stone alleged to be the pillar upon which Jesus was scourged.
Known as the Column of the Flagellation, the stone offers an object of contemplation for those visiting the church to reflect on Christ's Passion. This is especially true on Holy Thursday, when pilgrims traditionally go to churches throughout the city to venerate the decorated altars within which the Eucharist has been reposed in anticipation of Good Friday.
The column is kept in a glass reliquary in one of the side chapels of Saint Praxedes, a 9th century church named after an early Christian martyr who has long-standing devotion in Rome, but about whom little is known for certain.
The pillar itself, sculpted from black-and-white marble, was retrieved from the Holy Land during the medieval period.
Is the artifact which continues to be visited by pilgrims as the column of the scourging a true relic of Christ's Passion? Most scholars would say this is highly doubtful.
Yet the probable in-authenticity of the pillar does not take away from the value in venerating it, says one expert. Rather, it is reminiscent of the genuine spirituality of medieval Christians, like those who found the pillar and brought it back from the Holy Land.
“The Middle Ages had a very powerful sense of God’s Providence,” said Gregory DiPippo, managing editor of the New Liturgical Movement website, “and to them you could almost say it was illogical that God would allow something like (the pillar) – which would have been Sanctified by being part of the Lord’s Passion – to go missing.”
Whether the true pillar of the flagellation still exists anywhere is uncertain. Jerusalem's Chapel of the Apparition claims to have the true pillar: a broken red porphyry column which bears no resemblance to the artifact in Rome.
However, in speaking of Saint Praxedes pillar, DiPippo explained it was improbable that the original would have survived on account of the 1st century uprisings which led to the destruction of Jerusalem.
Nonetheless, there is inherent value in venerating an object that may not be genuine, when one takes into account the objective of veneration, he added.
In the Western tradition, “you aren’t venerating the object for its own sake, necessarily, but rather as an expression of a sort of realized presence of the person or the event that it represents.”
This point is further illustrated by comparing Western and Eastern liturgical practices, he said, observing that in the West, the priest incenses the relics of the saints, whereas Byzantines incense the images and icons.
“It is the living presence, realized presence in this case, of the Passion of Christ,” DiPippo said. “Even if it isn’t authentic, we are still honoring the Passion of Christ by venerating it as such.”
The pillar of Saint Praxedes was first brought to Italy by Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, a 13th century prelate appointed by Pope Innocent III, who had been serving as papal legate in the Holy Land during the sixth Crusade. Returning to Rome in the 1220s, he brought with him the column in question.
“One mustn’t think of this as a conscious fraud on the part of Cardinal Colonna, or the people who received it as the relic of the flagellation,” DiPippo explained, but rather of Medieval devotion.
This article was originally published on CNA April 3, 2015.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Mike Pence is opening his trip to the Asia-Pacific region amid increasing tensions in North Korea over the regime's nuclear and missile programs....
