A Catholic aid official who just returned from Eritrea described children too weak to walk and orphanage staffers overwhelmed by the number of children being dropped off because their families cannot feed them. “Unless you’ve been there and seen it, you cannot understand the gravity of the situation,” says Gabriel Delmonaco of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. “We are trying to save one life at a time.” Nearly half of Eritrea’s population is undernourished, and more than 85,000 children are malnourished as a result of widespread famine, according to Amnesty International. Eritrea’s 2002 drought resulted in severe water shortages and an almost complete failure of that year’s harvest. Since then, rainfall has been inadequate, and last year’s drought made conditions significantly worse.
Aid Official Describes Starvation in Eritrea
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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.