The Book of Kells is Ireland’s greatest cultural treasure and one of the world’s most famous medieval manuscripts. But it also holds a mystery that takes time and patience to decipher.
What’s to be learned through failure, through being humbled by our own faults? Generally that’s the only way we grow. In being humbled by our own inadequacies we learn those lessons in life that we are deaf to when we are strutting in confidence and pride.
The Foreign Office is to highlight the cases of persecuted Christians during Lent, the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced on Ash Wednesday. “It is shocking that 245 million Christians worldwide are currently facing persecution,” he said in a video message.
Earthly defeat, for us, can still be victory, just as earthily victory can be a sad defeat. Indeed, in a Christian perspective, without even considering the next life, sometimes our defeats and humiliations are what allows depth and richer life to flow into us and sometimes our victories rob us of the very things that bring us community, intimacy, and happiness.
Over 150 bishops, priests, nuns and laity nationwide attended the National Conference on the Bible at Nha Trang Diocese's Pastoral Center in Nha Trang City from Feb. 19-21.
A special Mass in Myeongdong Cathedral was celebrated by Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, auxiliary bishops and priests to mark their missions. The priests are being sent to Mexico, Japan, Spain and the United States to follow the teaching of Jesus: “Go and proclaim the kingdom of God (Lk. 9:60).”
As preparation for Easter Christians introduced the custom of observing two days of prayer, reflection, and fast to express their sorrow for the death of Christ. They gradually prolonged the period of preparation: in the third century it became a week, then three weeks until on the fourth century it extended to forty days: Lent thus began. The Council of Nicea (325 A.D) speaks of “the forty days” as an institution known to all and spread everywhere.
An Italian composer and writer visited Hong Kong at the start of the year to teach a series of lectures on the history of Catholic-inspired music, and talk about the main challenges facing the sacred music of the Church, which Pope Francis said in 2017 has become permeated by "superficiality and banality."
A group of Christian church investors is planning to put pressure on companies which have no women directors or a questionable record on tax. The Church Investors Group has pension fund members with £21bn in assets.
As a vowed, religious celibate I’m very conscious that today celibacy, whether lived out in a religious commitment or in other circumstances, is suspect, under siege, and is offering too little by way of a helpful apologia to its critics.