Focus

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  Blesseds showed exemplary faith

  Jun 13, 2019

  On his last day in Romania, Pope Francis visited the city of Blaj, in Transylvania. The highlight of his visit in the morning was the beatification of seven Romanian Greek-Catholic bishops. The pontiff used the occasion to slam the ongoing cultural “colonisation” and oppose the “new ideologies” that “devalue the person, life, marriage and the family [. . .] with alienating proposals as atheistic as those of the past”, which deny especially young people their cultural and religious roots, and make everything irrelevant “unless it serves our immediate interests”.

  
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  Veni Sancte Spiritus

  May 30, 2019

  The liturgy of Pentecost includes one of the more striking medieval texts in the Roman Missal, Veni Sancte Spiritus, or Come Holy Spirit.

  
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  Forgiveness through the Spirit

  May 30, 2019

  Some things happen in a blaze of splendour like a fireworks display. Others are as simple and sweet as a smooth stone being slipped into a still summer lake. Such was the deceptive quietness of Ruby’s calm remark, one Easter morning.

  
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  Eucharistic intimacy calls us to transform a destructive food system

  May 25, 2019

  When a priest offers the prayer to thank God for the “work of human hands,” during the sacrament of Eucharist, it “includes Christ’s memory of enslave

  
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  Pope Francis pays tribute to Jean Vanier

  May 18, 2019

  Christian philosopher, writer and humanist Jean Vanier, an ardent advocate for the most marginalized by society, died on 7 May aged 90. Pope Francis paid tribute to him as he travelled back to the Vatican after a three-day apostolic visit to the Balkan nations of Bulgaria and North Macedonia.

  
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  In ‘Happy’ Bhutan, PM turns a doctor on Saturdays

  May 18, 2019

  It’s Saturday in Bhutan and Lotay Tshering (pic) has just completed urinary bladder repair surgery on a patient at the Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital.

  
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  Heresy accusation letter, deconstructed

  May 11, 2019

  Let’s take on one of the indictments of Francis, so you can get a flavour of what is wrong here: “A Christian believer can have full knowledge of a divine law and voluntarily choose to break it in a serious matter, but not be in a state of mortal sin as a result of this action.”

  
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  Thanks to Jean Vanier, the spirit of the Risen Christ is present among the weakest of society

  May 09, 2019

  The founder of L’Arche, an organisation that fosters cohabitation of healthy people and people with physical and mental disabilities, passed away last night. L’Arche is present in 35 countries with 147 communities. Faith and Light, another association Vanier co-founded to bring together people with special needs, their families and friends, is present in at least 80 countries with 1,800 communities. Pope Francis remembers him, as does a Hong Kong missionary, who worked with him.

  
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  Malaysians demand justice for dead Indonesian maid

  May 02, 2019

  Malaysia’s justice system has come under fire after a judge threw out a case involving the torture and death of an Indonesian maid who had been working on the island of Penang without proper documentation.

  
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  Sri Lanka, martyrdom, and the light of faith

  May 02, 2019

  The Easter Exsultet, sung across the world as the bombs detonated in Colombo, hailed the arrival of the “night in which Christ has destroyed death.”