Good Friday Collection for the Holy Land
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
May the peace of Christ be with you!
The Holy Land Friars have contacted me with a special request. They are begging the help of all Secular Franciscans in promoting the Pontifical Good Friday Collection for the Holy Land.
The needs are many. Please do what you can to help. To learn more, see below, or spend some time on their website myfranciscan.org.
Remind others of this special collection, and thank you for your own prayers and financial support.
May the Holy Spirit continue to guide us as we journey together this Lent – and let’s make it a good one!
Peace and Lenten Joy,
Jan
The Holy Land Friars:
- Provide ongoing emergency funds
- Support 29 Catholic parishes, 4 homes for orphans and 3 academic institutions
- Operate 16 schools for more than 10,000 pre-K through grade 12 students that are open to all faiths and currently serve Muslims and Jews in addition to the Christians in the Holy Land.
- Provide university scholarships
- Relocate and provide homes to Christian families
- Rehabilitate destroyed homes for Christians families
- Provide senior care facilities in Bethlehem and Nazareth
- Create jobs for Christians in the Holy Land
- Preserve 74 sanctuaries and shrines from the life of Jesus and the prophets
- Support more than 100 men preparing to be priests or brothers
- Assist Syrian and Iraqi refugee families in Jordan and Lebanon by helping to pay for rent, food, heat, schooling and transportation.
The Holy Land friars need your help. Syria has been devastated by a conflict that has displaced half of the country’s population. The friars refuse to abandon the Christians and others in need.
Help us raise awareness, prayers and financial support for the friars in Syria, who continue to celebrate Mass, provide pastoral care and offer humanitarian aid – water, medicine, food and more – in the midst of this devastating conflict.
A Visioning for Formation
As in St. Francis’ Time, Spirit of Age Ultimately Doesn’t Satisfy
By Mary Stronach, OFS
(This article originally appeared in the Winter 2018-19 issue of Tau-USA)
Fr. David Pivonka, TOR
Setting the stage for a weekend of formation visioning, Fr. David Pivonka, TOR, provided a dose of reality.
“The world has profoundly changed in the last 25 years,” said the host of EWTN’s Wild Goose series. “Young people have no safe place. There is a sense of danger infiltrating every part of us.” He said that there are things that want to corrupt, to manipulate the spirit of faith.
He took workshop attendees through an historical view of God.
In the pre-modern world, pre-1600s, God is the starting point. The world is imbued with God. The truth is rooted in God, he explained.
From the 1600s through to the 1960s, the modern world view has man at the center of all things. “God is pushed off to the side. God might exist but there is no intimate contact. Humanity has the ability to make things better… fix the world’s problems. Right and wrong is based on the human vision.”
In the post-modern world – the last 50 years – there is no center. There is chaos. “The truth is whatever an individual believes to be true.” There are no boundaries. God is not a part of the equation. During this era, he said, many people have no identification with religion.
Youth talk about being “spiritual” but not “religious,” he said. They react to culture mainly by feeling. It is an era when you “can’t offend anybody.” He continued, “This is a non-reflective age. We are so busy, so consumed…We don’t reflect on consequences.” In the 24-hour news cycle, we are “bombarded with noise. Our interior life is suffering. We need to invite people to an interior life.”
“Words like ‘should or should not’ are foreign to this culture,” he added. “Truth and preference are largely the same. If I determine what’s true and someone disagrees, then it reflects on me… The world is so divided, so hostile, we can’t dialogue.” He referred to a quote in a school that said, “We will tolerate all things except what we believe to be intolerant.”
He offered three approaches on how to engage this culture. The first is “accommodation,” accepting that every- thing is OK. But, he said, using this approach “ultimately doesn’t respect the individual.”
The second is not to critique the culture. “This is an escape behind walls, and leads to isolation,” he said. “The church is counter-cultural. We must confront it.”
He provided a more hopeful alternative with the third approach – “Infiltration and transformation.” Engage the culture, he said. “Desire to create a fraternal world. When Francis embraced the leper, he recognized Christ…Recognize and see that, and help other people to see it. There are two conversions into Christ. The first is to leave the world and go to Christ. The second is to go back to the world with Christ to bring to the world what we discover… The power of the Gospel is an encounter of the love of God that changes us… Especially now, in the midst of chaos, they see in us something that can satisfy.”