“There is someone who loves you even before you deserve it”. This phrase has always served as a motto for Giovanni Merlini, a priest of the Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood born in 1795 and beatified, after a process that lasted more than a century, less than two weeks ago in the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
Around three dozen young pilgrims from Macau will travel to Rome in summer, to take part in the Jubilee of Youth. The event is the crowning moment of a pilgrimage that also includes visits to Lourdes and Assisi.
The Chinese Section of Santa Rosa de Lima Secondary School will once again play host to the Prayer Service for Christian Unity, an annual ecumenical celebration that draws together worshippers from different Christian denomination. The observance is part of the broader Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
It’s one of the most vibrant and expressive public displays of faith in Asia’s largest Catholic nation, but also an exuberant trademark for Filipino communities spread around the world. Macau Special Administrative Region is no exception. On Sunday morning, believers will flock to Saint Augustine’s Church to attend a Mass in honor of Señor Santo Niño. Later on, hundreds of Overseas Filipino Workers will swarm the streets of central Macau to celebrate Sinulog, a lively festival that intertwines faith, culture and tradition.
The Church traditionally uses three celebrations after Christmas to emphasize the manifestation of Jesus’ divinity. First, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the Child Jesus is recognized as God by the three wise men. Then, as we saw last Sunday, at His baptism performed by John the Baptist, a voice from heaven reveals that Jesus is the beloved Son of the Father and a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, descends upon Him. This trilogy concludes in today’s celebration with the Gospel of the wedding at Cana, where Jesus during a wedding and after His mother’s request, turns water into wine and begins His messianic signs that would be completed with the sign of greater love through His sacrifice on the cross.
The University of Saint Joseph will be welcoming students from Portugal’s largest educational institution for socially disadvantaged children and youth as soon as next year. The program was confirmed to “O Clarim” by Álvaro Barbosa, Vice-rector for Internationalization and Academic Affairs of USJ. Macau’s Catholic university signed a collaborative agreement with Casa Pia de Lisboa just before Christmas.
In his usual Sunday Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square, on the occasion of the feast of the Baptism of the Lord which, according to the liturgical calendar currently in force in the Catholic Church, marks the end of the Christmas season, Pope Francis made the following statement: “the face and voice of God are revealed through the human side of Jesus”.
This prayer of the priest appears before my eyes in a hallucinative glow on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord: “May the mingling of this water and wine bring us to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share our humanity.” The celebrant of the Eucharist utters this prayer under breath while mixing a drop of water into wine in preparation for the offertory. When I said this prayer during my first mass, the baptism scene of Jesus came to my mind without any prior meditation, and it stayed on with me.
In the long sermon delivered on 1 January during the celebration of the New Year Mass in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Damascus, Yohanna X, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, stressed the expressed desire of Syrian Christians to commit themselves to the peaceful construction of “a new Syria”, hoping that the new administration will have the same desire.
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:18-19).