These are harsh winter days for those who thought there were springtime signs for reform in the catholic ecclesial institution. May they not lose their hope, or their breath! On Saturday, October 28, the synthesis of the first phase of the “Synod on Synodality” of the Catholic Church, the fourth in the 10 years of […]
“It is vicious barbarity by Hamas in response to even more serious, vicious barbarity by the Israeli government,” was my first thought that came to mind. I find Hamas’s action repugnant in its atrocity and senselessness. I can only understand it as an evil expression of hatred, revenge, despair and powerlessness accumulated over eight decades. […]
I never wanted to be important, just the lesser brother of the smallest ones and of all the forgotten ones. But, due to circumstances of history, the day on which I passed from this mortal life to the full Life became an important date for many sisters and brothers of evangelical dreams. My passing –which […]
Many animals –ranging from worms to mammals, including insects, molluscs, amphibians, fish, reptiles and birds– feel pain. And they do not simply feel a specific, isolated pain, but rather a general malaise of the organism. In different ways and to different degrees, but they suffer nevertheless. We human beings are part of an immense planetary […]
“That’s the way it is” we say, not knowing if we mean a realistic lucidity or a defeatist abandonment. That’s the way it is, and anything else is not possible. That’s the way it is, and it is impossible to stand up, wait, breathe, hope, create: to be or to make being more. What is […]
[Text of de Lecture given in the Library of the Autonomous Community of Navarra, March 27, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-pYHo5j3NE&t=614s] When my friends who organize this series of lectures on “spirituality and suffering” asked me to talk about loneliness and suffering, the first thing that came to my mind –as it often occurs to me- was the […]
Yesterday, April 12, at the age of 88, Monsignor Gaillot, Bishop of Evreux (France) from 1982 to 1995, died. He was a peaceful and energetic man, passionate about justice for all the excluded, a prophet of the Good News of Jesus, of a fraternal world, of a human Church. He supported conscientious objection against military […]
Easter arrived again. It is the Easterof Jesus, the crucified prophet, the singular image for Christians of the universal hope for all crucified people. It is the Easter of the first full moon of spring that so many cultures have celebrated thousands of years before our Christian Era: Chinese, Indians, Sumerians, Babilonians and Jews, and […]
Holy Week could make sense even for those who do not share the Christian myth, if it were a vindication, not of the brutal death of a single man two thousand years ago, but of the violated dignity of all those who were then victims of the viciousness of power, including those crucified with Jesus […]
Pope Nicholas V granted “full and free permission” to the Portuguese Crown to “capture and subjugate Saracens and pagans” in its African expansion (Bull Dum Diversas, 1452). Alexander VI Borgia blessed the arrival of the Spaniards in America and stipulated the division of dominions between Castile and Portugal (Bull Inter Caetera, 1493). These and other […]