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Vatican City, 22 May 2013.
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Portale de "L'Osservatore Romano"
Today's top news
Volume XII of the Opera Omnia [complete works] of Joseph Ratzinger

Homilies for friends

The Italian edition of Volume XII of Joseph Ratzinger's Opera Omnia, edited by Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is now on sale in bookshops.  It is entitled Annunciatori della Parola e Servitori della vostra gioia. Teologia e spiritualità del Sacramento dell'Ordine (Città del Vaticano, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013, 982 pages, € 55). The book is a collection of scientific studies, meditations and homilies – from 1954 to 2002 – on the...
May 15, 2013
 

Badam Zari
the first woman candidate in Pakistan

An illiterate Pakistani woman, Badam Zari, is the first woman to be a candidate in the elections in the tribal areas of her country, a conservative region where the right to vote for many women is still under discussion. Just like Malala, the teenager seriously injured by the Taliban on account of her commitment, Badam - housewife, fully veiled and wife of a teacher – is fighting for the education of girls. In order to continue her battle, she has decided to stand as an independent candidate in...
May 3, 2013
 

The First Birthday

Women Church World is celebrating its first birthday. It is an important milestone. In these past 12 months we have tried to listen to the voice of women who are a fundamental and essential pillar of the life of the Church. We have sought to give an account of their work and of their intellectual contribution, all too often ignored. We wanted to dialogue with women of other faiths; we have searched the history of the saints to see what could make them once again protagonists in women’s lives today....
May 3, 2013
 

Rita and her impossible flight

Rita is the name of my maternal grandmother, a woman of peasant origins from Asti, who has always cultivated a close devotional relationship with her saint: in fact, her legal name was Magdalene but her mother, my great-grandmother, must have been well aware of the new developments if already in 1902 she decided to rename her Rita, even though the great shrine in Turin which launched the devotion to the saint in the region would be built only in 1925. In this name change lies the history of...
May 3, 2013
 
The self-mockery of Wisława Szymborska

The song of imperfection

t was not easy to get her to talk about her poetry; about this biographers, friends, former colleagues and students all agree. Especially after 1996, the year she received the Nobel Prize for literature. "Are there butterflies eager to impale themselves on a pin?" Wisława Szymborska replied to every attempt to make her comment on her works. "I do not know what poetry is. All I know is - the Polish writer, who died on 1 February 2012, repeated in her interviews - you have to be capable of astonishment....
May 3, 2013
 

Catherine and Paul VI in Pavia

The Women's University College St. Catherine of Siena of Pavia has organized for Monday 22 April, a day of study "Papa Montini, Catherine and women” to celebrate its founding by the will of Montini four decades ago. Paul VI, as is known, always gave a great deal of attention to women: In addition to having a privileged relationship with his mother, Giuditta Alghisi, he oversaw universities for Catholic women, he wanted women as listeners in the Second Vatican Council and he nominated St. Catherine...
May 3, 2013
 

Trafficking discussed in Mexico City

he fifth conference of the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations of Latin America and the Caribbean dedicated to the drama of human trafficking was held in Mexico City from 8-12 April. As the world body's president Maria Giovanna Ruggieri explained, the objective of the regional conference was to raise awareness of the issue both among the ecclesial communities and the civil community. The speeches dealt with this terrible scourge from different angles: the definition to be given to the...
May 3, 2013
 

Afghan girl students

Despite the economic problems and obstacles caused by folk traditions, more and more Afghan girls are returning to school in their villages in order to secure for themselves a future. One of these structures is in Qalai Gadar, a rural community in the district of Qara Bagh about forty kilometres north of the capital Kabul. It is one of the few elementary schools available to the local population. Opened in 2012, it was built by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The building, which...
May 3, 2013
 

Chiara Lubich in Taiwan

"Patterns of Unity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on the Thought of Chiara Lubich (1920-2008)." This is the title of the meeting that took place on 12-13 April this year at the Fu Jen Catholic University, in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Divided into four parts - dedicated respectively to theology, education, the economy of communion and the dialogue between religions - the meeting was opened by the Brazilian Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life...
May 3, 2013
 

A new president of Usmi

With a large majority, Sister Maria Regina Cesarato was elected as the new president of USMI, the Union of Major Superiors of Italy (born in the context of the renewal of institutes of consecrated life initiated by Pius XII), succeeding mother Viviana Ballarin. "Thank you for your confidence. I rely on the help of the Lord and the co-responsibility, and communion of each of you, the newly elected President said, who was born on April 6, 1952 in Piove di Sacco in Padua and is Superior General of...
May 3, 2013
 

Women and water
in the Solomon islands

The Solomon Islands, a developing country in the South Pacific Ocean, has one of the highest rates of urbanization in the region, while the infrastructure for basic services are insufficient to cope with the influx of people moving from the provinces towards the capital, Honiara. 35 per cent of the inhabitants of the town have, for this reason, to cope with the serious consequences for health care due to the lack of drinking water and of health services. Located on the main island of Guadalcanal,...
May 3, 2013
 
The film

El hijo de la novia

The lady is old and, above all, she is sick. She has for some time had Alzheimer's disease. The characters that revolve around her - the very much in love husband who goes daily to visit in the centre where the woman lives; Rafael, the forty-two year old son, apparently successful, but in reality in a state of deep crisis over his choices and priorities; Vicky's granddaughter, who lives with her divorced mother; the young girlfriend of Rafael - are the protagonists of the film El hijo de la novia...
May 3, 2013
 
The essay

Le don d’organes

Patients, doctors, nurses, recipients, donors and their families: to all of these people the Swiss science journalist Marlyse Tschui gives voice in her essay Le don d’organes. Donneurs, greffés et soignants témoignent (Editions Anne Carrière, 2003). The result is a kind of choral narration, complex and multifaceted, of one of the most fascinating and ambivalent fields of modern medicine, that of organ transplants. The doubts, the hopes, brain death, tragedy and euphoria, the nerve-wracking waiting,...
May 3, 2013
 

The great invention

Of course there is no doubt: this is the autobiography of a great director, who was also a jazz musician, one that therefore spans the history of Italian entertainment. But reading La grande invenzione by Pupi Avati (Rizzoli, 2013) we find that it is mainly the story of his mother, from when she, an insignificant employee who coming from the countryside, manages to marry the handsome son of the owner – who, however, has fallen into ruin - until her death, which took place in Rome, with her children...
May 3, 2013
 

Francesca Flores

Mother Cabrini and her travelling companion arrived in Mendoza on December 1, 1895, and from there, a few days later, they arrived in Buenos Aires, where the Italian nun began to travel the length and breadth of the city to find a home to begin her work. It was during one of these walks that Mother Cabrini saw a very high palm tree. Looking at it she said, "There, we will have a mission." It was the Flores district, where the sisters settled four years later, to protect orphaned girls and children...
May 3, 2013
 

The thunderous yes to God

Antje Jackelen, Lutheran Bishop of Lund, considers herself to be the daughter of the Enlightenment, something often claimed by secular humanists. "Actually, I say that I am the daughter of the Christian Church, of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. But I was trained by the German Enlightenment, which represented a lesser threat to religion when compared to the French. I am influenced by Kant and his conviction that faith and reason complement each other. His "dare to know" has encouraged...
May 3, 2013
 

The enthusiasm of women

Mary Ward was born in the England of Elizabeth I, when it was difficult to be Catholic, and to fulfill her religious vocation she emigrated to Saint-Omer in France. But her attempt to practice an active life dedicated to teaching, inspired by the rule of the Jesuits, met with many difficulties. Despite her journeys to meet Popes and try to convince them, she never received their approval, even though she had already founded monasteries and schools in various countries. Today, more than four thousand...
May 3, 2013
 

With calm determination

We meet Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokesperson for the U.S. bishops' conference, on an historic afternoon in March. As we climb the Janiculum, destination the North American College, rain floods down on Rome and the Cardinals are closed in the Sistine Chapel to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI. She is here, in apartment number 4, the Rome headquarters of this solid commander of the vessel, perfectly able both to sail the stormy sea and to enjoy the navigation on a beautiful sunny day. We wait...
May 3, 2013
 
The essay

To dare God

"We must have the courage to say it. Have the courage to speak the name of God", Etty Hillesum wrote in the amazing pages of her human and spiritual journey that, passing through the smoke of Auschwitz, was directed, however, towards heaven towering above her. And that she - a young Jewish girl - learned to see precisely in the horror of the camp. A journey in which the body of Etty was able to transform the desire for the other into a human relation with the other. A journey that two people today...
March 5, 2013
 
The novel

 I'll tell you some other time

As part of the reconstruction of the memory of the Holocaust – an extremely rich literary genre - a new kind of memoir is being born, that by the children of survivors. A particularly successful example is the book by Alba Arikha the book, Te lo dirò un’altra volta (Bollati Boringhieri, 2013), in which a young woman weaves the experiences of her adolescence as a young French woman of the eighties with the stories, fragmentary but for this reason even more striking, of the life of her father and...
March 5, 2013
 
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Portale de "L'Osservatore Romano"
Today's top news
The Mass at Santa Marta

No one must kill
in God's name

No one must kill in God's name. Instead, each and every one not only can but must do good, whatever faith they profess, for “they have within them the commandment to do good”, since they are “created in the image of God”. This is the essence of Pope Francis reflection this morning, Wednesday, 22 May, for those who took part in the celebration of early Mass in the Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae. The Gospel passage from Mark (9:38-40), proclaimed at the Mass, refers to the disciples' complaint...
 
The Pope's Mass at Santa Marta

True power is service

True power is service.  On Tuesday, 21 May, at Mass in the Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae the Pontiff returned to a topic that he has mentioned previously, this time commenting on the Gospel passage of the day (Mk 9:30-37).  The tragic news of the tornado which devastated Oklahoma City, USA was mentioned  during the Prayers of the Faithful, of which one of the intentions was for the victims. In the Gospel account Jesus passed through Galilee in the company of his disciples and he spoke to...
 
On the Solemnity of Pentecost the Pope celebrates the Day of movements, new communities, associations and lay groups

A Church that reaches out to all

A Church not closed in on itself but open to meeting everyone and commited to being alongside the poorest of the poor in the “outskirts of existence” of the world. This is what Pope Francis proposed to the movements, the new communities, associations and lay groups on the Feast of Pentecost. On the day dedicated to them during the Year of Faith, the Pope met twice, in a matter of hours, the leaders of these ecclesial realities arriving in crowds at St Peter's Square. At the prayer vigil, presided...
 

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