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Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC, will receive the Eighth Annual Partnership for Global Justice Award on May 1, in New York. Fr. McDonagh, a regular contributor to World Mission, will accept the award and deliver a keynote address. The ceremony will be followed by an orientation symposium in preparation for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development that will take place at the United Nations from May 2 to 14.
Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistani minister killed by the Taliban, was born on September 9, 1968, to a Christian family. His father, Jacob, served in the army before entering the field of education as a teacher and later as chairman of the board of the Churches of Kushpur. In the Autumn of 2010, he was hospitalized in Islamabad. According to local sources, his condition deteriorated significantly after the news of the assassination of the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, on January 4, 2011. He entered into a form of mental and physical depression that, ultimately, led to cardiac arrest, and his death on Jan. 10, 2011.
When I was visiting the hovels of the poor in the overcrowded slums of Manila, where we are setting up livelihood projects for the impoverished families of young teenagers we rescue from the horrific conditions of overcrowded disease infested jails, I met Mark and his hardworking mother. She has a junk collection business and the tiny hovel made of bits of broken plywood, flattened tin cans and plastic sheets was half filled with the collections they had made. Their treasure was plastic bottles, crushed aluminum cans, bits of plastic, old newspaper, all useless junk to you and me but the difference between life and death for the family.
Beauty and greatness can be found in very simple surroundings, in little flashes of insights and in a lot of small loving gestures by very common people. That is a lesson we could learn easily in our daily life – either in a garden nearby or, if you have the luck to visit an African mission, in the driest place on Earth. This reminds me that our great God is also a God of small things.
“The well-known sentence of the European Court of Human Rights about the crucifix has raised contrasting feelings in me: I find fair that schools (and other public places) conform themselves to the fact that Italy is not a confessional state but I shiver imagining the crucifix taken down from the walls as if something to be ashamed of. Even if I try to think what Jesus Himself would say, two very different sentences come to my mind: ‘When you pray, do it in the secret of your room’; ‘The one who is ashamed of me and the Gospel…’”
– Raffaele, Genoa
