“Before the festival of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). With these words John’s Gospel opens its account of the Passion, the fulfillment of a life spent for humankind in sharing and in loving in total obedience to the Father to the extreme gift of himself. “It is finished!” (John 19:30),...
“What is Man?” (Ps 8:5). An itinerary of biblical anthropology is a new document from the The Pontifical Biblical Commission (DPCB), currently it is available only in Italian from the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The study was requested by Pope Francis, who considered it necessary to bring clarity to issues of great importance for contemporary culture, drawing light from the Bible. There are many interesting aspects and innovations in the document; this contribution aims to illustrate them. A first innovative element...
On March 22, 2020, the government in Damascus announced the first case of contagion – a citizen from abroad – and followed up with drastic measures: schools, universities and mosques closed; public sector staff and working hours cut back; tight restrictions on travel; the military draft suspended and parliamentary elections postponed from April 13 to May 20. The picture is alarming. According to the UNICEF Representative in Syria, Fran Equiza, military action has shut down the Allouk water station in...
The wind of reconciliation has been blowing across Africa and other parts of the world recently. In April, 2019, for instance, Pope Francis performed a gesture that went viral on social media. During the conclusion of a “diplomatic and ecumenical” retreat of the South Sudanese leaders at the Vatican, the pope went down on his knees and kissed the feet of President Salva Kiir Mayardit and his rival, Riek Machar, among others. Earlier, on March 9, 2018, Kenya breathed a...
COP25, the 25th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, took place from 2 to 15 December 2019 in Madrid, a last-minute substitute after Chile withdrew as host due to unrest in its capital city, Santiago, the proposed venue. The Madrid meetings nevertheless proceeded under the presidency of Chile. This was the fourth such meeting following COP21 in Paris in December 2015. What was the goal of COP25? Was the goal met or even...
A few years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez published his novel Love in the Time of Cholera.[1] Years earlier, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, who came to Naples in 1884 to treat the victims of a cholera epidemic, wrote his Letters From A Mourning City.[2] In both cases, an epidemic caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae is the background for deeply human stories (imaginary in Márquez’s novel and real in...
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