More than 210,000 people worldwide contract Hansen’s disease each year, even though it is preventable, Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, reported on World Leprosy Day (Jan. 30). • South African Catholics prayed for the recovery of the 92-year-old anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela after he returned home following treatment for a respiratory infection. • Catholic missionaries are ready to set up faith communities in Bhutan after the predominantly Buddhist and Hindu country announced on Jan. 27 that it would accept the registration of Christians for the first time. • It is “unacceptable” to evangelize without addressing the urgent problems of poverty, injustice and oppression, Pope Benedict XVI said in a message released on Jan. 25 in preparation for World Mission Sunday next October • The Italian inventor Onorio Frati has devised an “electronic rosary,” a pocket-size egg-shaped gadget. • Catholic Relief Services’ international staff and their families in Cairo, Egypt, were evacuated to Jordan on Jan. 31 as pro-democracy demonstrations continued.
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In this episode of Inside the Vatican, Colleen Dulle and Gerard O’Connell discuss the 2025 Jubilee Year, beginning on Christmas Eve 2024 and ending in January 2026.
Pope Francis prayed that the Jubilee Year may become “a season of hope” and reconciliation in a world at war and suffering humanitarian crises as he opened the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve.
‘If God can visit us, even when our hearts seem like a lowly manger, we can truly say: Hope is not dead; hope is alive and it embraces our lives forever!’
Inspired by his friend and mentor Henri Nouwen, Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, leader of Ukrainian Catholics in the U.S., invites listeners in his Christmas Eve homily to approach the manger with renewed awe and openness.