It is the greatest symbol of the suffering Jesus underwent to redeem the sins of mankind. The Procession of the Passion of Our Lord made its way through the streets of Macau over the weekend, in a unique demonstration of faith. Thousands of people took part in the ceremony, announcing the triumph of Jesus over sin and despair. Among them were pilgrims from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Read by an increasingly broad and diverse audience around the world, Japanese manga has long held an enormous fascination among young and old alike. In addition to the unusual superhero adventures, this peculiar type of comic book, conceived in its own format, also portrays stories of ordinary men and women. In this way, countless episodes of Japanese history have been transmitted to school-age children; and now, the trend seems to extend to a type of character who, even under fierce persecution, remained firm in their faith in Christ: we are talking about the so-called Japanese “hidden Christians”. A phenomenon that originated in the 17th century, when Christianity – introduced with immense success in the Japanese archipelago a century earlier, thanks to the continued work of missionaries from the Portuguese Patronage of the East – was expressly prohibited, with all missionaries present there being ordered to be expelled. Many of them, for refusing this order, would later be martyred, and, even under torture, they never renounced their faith.
We have seen previously (Keeper, 4) that through the centuries, some Fathers of the Church have provided us with a record of the list of the Popes until their times. But we have not only the list of names, but also the biographies of the Popes through the centuries. The recognized source of these biographies, especially of the first 15 centuries of Christianity, is the Liber Pontificalis.
Explaining the nature of theological hope, we now focus on some of its notes or properties. The notes that help unveil the nature of Christian hope are many. For our part, we shall develop three significant properties of hope, namely certain hope, patient hope and prayerful hope.