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The Vatican is mum on the cost of the Synod on Synodality…
Vatican mum on cost of synodality synod Skip to content The Vatican has not responded to questions regarding the expense it incurred to organize and host October’s synod of bishops on synodality, a month-long meeting of more than 400 people, held in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall. But sources have confirmed to The Pillar that many of the costs associated with the meeting will be be borne by bishops’ conferences and local dioceses around the world, and that the same is expected for an October 2024 meeting that will conclude the process. Leave a comment —The synod on synodality was announced by Pope Francis in March 2020, as a years-long process of common prayer, discernment and consultation among ecclesial leaders and lay Catholics. The synod was meant to engage Catholics around the world...
7 History Books That Help Explain The Israel-Hamas War…
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The late Matthew Perry once prayed to become famous. Years later, he prayed to God “for the right thing: help.” Pray for the repose of his soul…..
“God, please help me,” Matthew Perry whispered. “Show me that you are here. God, please help me.” In his memoir, the late actor described an encounter where he unmistakably knew God’s presence. He had been struggling with addiction. He even thought he was dying. But the peace that he received when he cried out to God “with the desperation of a drowning man” — which would ultimately be how he would die — was something he would go back to, to stay sober, and to remember the truth of God, the truth of more. I have no reason to believe Perry was schooled in St. Ignatius Loyola, but like a good Ignatian student, he would return to that moment to remember the certainty of God. He had gone from hating himself to feeling “safe” and “taken care of.” He wrote: “Decades of struggling with God, and wr...
The Pope’s media blackout created a shadowy Synod on Synodality, with its own ‘sideshows’…
Sometimes the boring stuff is the most important. Anyone who has ever worked in journalism for several decades, such as myself, can attest to this. Whether you’re sifting through legal documents or financial statements, there’s more often than not a story — or at the very least some important information that can be used as supporting material — that can be gleaned from such an exercise. The same often goes for materials and documents released by the Vatican. I often try to read Holy See correspondence in Italian (like the United Nations, the Vatican often puts out information in a variety of languages) on the Vatican website or in its official newspaper l’Osservatore Romano. But information out of Rome, often resembling a fire hose, was down to a trickle over the past ...
How to Bring Peace to the World? Start With Sacramental Confession, Cardinal Says…
“At the same time, however, may they be days illuminated by hope,” he encouraged, “indeed by the certainty that Christ’s arms, opened wide on the cross, powerfully invite all humanity to reconciliation, mercy, and peace.” Piacenza recalled Christ’s words on the Mount of Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “[This is] a peace that is God-given and that demands to be built by people, beginning with the peace in their own hearts, because only those who are reconciled with God and with themselves can truly be peacemakers,” he said. The cardinal also invited priests to practice “great generosity” in listening to confessions, “for in them is strengthened, and in the case of grave sin, recreated, that indispensable bond with Christ.” The sacrament of confession — also known as penance or re...
This Abandoned Ford Dealer Is Filled With Perfectly Preserved ’80s Cars…
News → News by Brand → Ford News The owner’s widow has been keeping it clean for decades. Auto Retro via YouTube We’ve all seen countless videos of people rummaging through old dealerships and the dusty, rusty cars that inhabit them. However, this 1980s Ford dealership is different, because it’s been stagnant in Germany for decades, and is filled with 1980s cars in brand-new condition that still look pristine. How does a dealership remain loaded with cars in its showroom, completely preserved for four decades, without anyone either buying it or breaking in? According to the YouTube channel Auto Retro, the original owner of the dealership died many years ago and his widow kept it. Not only did she keep it without running the business or selling the cars, but she had it cleaned a...
The World’s Most Beautiful Bird Lives in Yellowstone National Park…
Nothing compares to a peregrine falcon. Of course, comparing anything in nature is foolhardy. Nonetheless, when beholding this bird, perched or flying, one can only think of superlatives. Strikingly beautiful, masked face, the fastest animal, and a gaze of majesty knowing the ages. Bold and powerful. Untouchable. If you have seen it, you know what we mean—the falcon epitomizes the raw power and beauty of nature all at once. Their worldwide distribution makes them observable to many and has them clinging to rocky cliff s, usually above waterways, but also city skyscrapers, which they use as cliffs. Once nearly brought to extinction, these birds have made a remarkable comeback. Nature’s stunning bird has been restored, and Yellowstone National Park (YNP) is no exception. Evolution honed pere...
The humiliation of another, my business…
There is your brother, naked, crying,and you stand there confusedover the choice of an attractive floor covering.He who sent forth his apostles without goldhad not need of gold to form his Church.The Church possesses gold, not to hoard,but to scatter abroadand come to the aid of the unfortunate.If you have two shirts in your closet,one belongs to youand the other to the man with no shirt. — St. Ambrose of Milan The Gospel for today is on love of God and of neighbor together as the greatest commandment. This is important above all in determining what the ultimate purpose of all other laws is. To love neighbor is to will or otherwise choose those and only those possibilities that serve human flourishing, the genuine good of others. To love God is to choose in accord with his will, to love wh...
This Synod is wide, shallow, and contrary to Vatican II…
Pope Francis at the Synod on Synodality, Oct. 4, 2023. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez I am now home from Rome and want to try to summarize what I had learned while there and my overall impressions about the Synod. Let me start with an anecdote. Fifteen years ago, I was hosting my eight-year-old nephew on a vacation to my home in Pennsylvania. We were driving to Gettysburg and as we were crossing the Susquehanna river I said to him that the river is very beautiful and “wide and shallow”. To which he responded with an impish grin: “You’re wide and shallow.” Those words came to my mind as a most apt description of the big Meeting on meetings that the Vatican has strangely decided to call a “Synod on Synodality”. I say “strangely” because we still do not know what synodality means in any specific the...
Mythical Creatures: The Lore and Legends Behind 3 Medieval Monsters…
All sorts of strange animals bounded through medieval minds. There were the blemmyes, beings who wore their faces on the front of their torsos, and the bonnacons, bullish beasts that fought their foes with fireballs of dung. There were sea monks and mermaids and mermen, not to mention the many species of sea serpents. And while barnacle birds fell from trees as if they were fruit, some mythical sheep were thought to be suspiciously strong thanks to the wriggling worms that sat inside their brains. Of course, certain creatures appeared in the stories and artworks of the Middle Ages and Renaissance much more than others. In many ways, the dragon, the griffin, and the unicorn were the three mythical darlings of medieval Europe. They appeared again and again, in written words and in illustrati...
The First Synod on Synodality Assembly Is Over. What Comes Next?
The majority of synod delegates voted in favor of a proposal “to involve Christians of other denominations in the synodical Catholic processes at all levels and to invite more fraternal delegates to the next session of the assembly in 2024” with 25 delegates objecting to the proposal in Saturday’s vote. The document also calls for “ways to be developed” to achieve “a more active involvement of deacons, priests, and bishops in the synod process during the coming year.” “A synodal Church cannot do without their voices, experiences, and contributions. We need to understand the reasons for the resistance to synodality by some of them,” it adds. A call to ‘bear witness’ to the synod More in Vatican Rather than focusing on concrete steps, synod organizers in the last days of the assembly encoura...
The Story Behind the Viral Video of the Nun Who Tackled the Environmental Activist…
The startling scene of a nun chasing and tackling an environmental activist Oct. 17 continues to make the rounds on social networks. The matter that led to this spectacular confrontation, however, is not recent, and has its origins in a controversial sanctuary construction project initiated in 2018 within the Diocese of Viviers, in the Monts d’Ardèche regional park in southeastern France. It has to be said that the project led by the Missionary Family of Notre-Dame (FMND), founded in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II, is particularly ambitious given the current state of the Church landscape in France, whose trend has been of steady decline for years, while historic Catholic monuments are disappearing one after the other. Since the start of construction in 2019, the site has...
