Browse past isues
Help the mission
Support the mission
Get in touch
Deep in China’s “spirit world,” an inflation crisis is brewing that would give central bankers chills. For hundreds of years, Chinese have burned stacks of so-called “ghost money” for their ancestors to help ensure their comfort in the afterlife. The fake bills resemble a gaudier version of Monopoly money, emblazoned with the beatific-looking image of the Emperor of the Underworld.
Two vast underground aquifers, storing billions of liters of water, have been discovered in the poorest and least developed area of Kenya. The finds, in Turkana county in the north west, were uncovered using new technology to interpret ground-penetrating radar from satellites.
The Comboni Missionaries are celebrating the 75th anniversary of their arrival in Peru, their first missionary field in Latin America. It was on September 11, 1938 that the three pioneers, Fr. Alois Ipfelkofer, Fr. Michael Wagner, both from Germany and Fr. Andrew Riedl from South Tirol, arrived at Callao Harbor near Lima, the capital.
Governments in rich and poor countries alike should renounce their focus on agribusiness and give more support to small-scale, local food production to achieve global food security and tackle climate change, according to UNCTAD, the U.N. trade and development body.
“It is not my work only. It is the Lord’s.” Such was the summation of Sr. Angelique Namaika, a member of the Augustine Sisters of Dungu and Doruma, as she spoke to reporters in an international conference call, upon winning the Nansen Refugee Award bestowed annually by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Namaika has been working for the past four years with women forced to leave their homes in the northeastern Congolese bush because of the ongoing civil strife in the Congo.
Imagine the scene in a charity clinic where a teenager was brought threatening suicide. Barbara, 17 years old, was crying out in her anguish, beating her clenched fists on the table and screaming, “I can’t live with a face like this, I am better off dead, dead!” She wailed and wept and the nurses could see the cause of her anger and frustration: uneven dark and white blotches had disfigured her face, the result of dangerous toxic skin whitening creams. She wanted to look like a movie star but it all went wrong.
Filipinos are a people known to deal with death not only with grief but also with fear. For a highly superstitious race, Filipinos believe that the soul of the dead lingers in the mortal world even if its earthly body expires and that the soul makes its presence felt among the living by showing up as ghosts. Generations have passed and the Filipino’s belief of ghosts has been passed through word of mouth, generation after generation – except among those who have been living among the dead.
Our priests and cathechists will have to find ways to change this perception that extravagance and prolonged wakes and funerals are “Catholic.” There’s room certainly for a more festive observance of wakes and funerals and November 1, but we need more solemnity, a time to reflect about our existence on earth, of the goodness of the deceased, and how we might want to carry on their legacy.
