In one of his writings from that year, Brito clearly refers to the enormous difficulties he faced daily: “Such is my relation for the year 1682. It all boils down to this: we have no human support to lean on, kings and princes oppose us, the powerful and learned ones do their best to expel us; and even so, thanks to a special protection of God Our Lord, who keeps us on this earth, we managed to spread His Holy Religion.”
Suddenly, we are not talking of Covid anymore.
Once we have removed the courageous announcement of our faith that frees, we have remained trapped in the slavery of the dictatorship of relativism, which oppresses.
A friend from Poland sent me an endless video, filmed with the cell phone: a huge queue, going around a corner and around another corner and on and on… to a place to give blood to send to Ukraine.
The English-speaking community of the Cathedral, composed mainly of Filipinos, celebrated this first day in preparation for Easter, at Sao Domingos Church. It was a joyful but somber occasion for the English community to celebrate Ash Wednesday. We may recall that the communities of the Cathedral used Sao Domingos during the Cathedral renovation period.
“There is no reason for excluding the possibility of another wholesale repression of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church as came about in 1946 with the complicity of the Orthodox brethren and the blessing of Moscow,” he stated.
Those from a lot longer ago, World War II, few are still alive. But an 81 year-old remembers …
In Christian tradition, pride is a more fundamental sin than the other capital sins, and thus is described as the queen, mother and principle of all other vices and sins.
In the previous two parts, we have basically spoken about what God has done and is doing for us. Now it’s time to ask, “What should we do for God?”
Scripture scholar Brant Pitre in his recent book Introduction to the Spiritual Life: Walking the Path of Prayer with Jesus, gives us guidelines for a Christian spiritual life. He starts with the maxim that the path of prayer is not only informative but transformative.