FAITH/STORIES

VATICAN CITY - Never stop searching for God and being open to receiving his love and wisdom, Pope Benedict XVI said.

"Driven by love, God has set out toward us" in order to "meet the unrest of our hearts, the unrest of our questioning and seeking," he said April 21 during the chrism Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

"That restlessness for God, that journeying toward him, so as to know and love him better, must not be extinguished in us," said the pope in his homily.

Presiding over the first of two Holy Thursday liturgies, Pope Benedict blessed the oils that will be used in the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, ordination and the anointing of the sick.

Grieving — the painful physical, emotional and spiritual journey that we go through to come to terms with the loss of someone through death, separation or divorce — is among the most sacred and the most human things one will ever undergo. It plummets us into the mysteries of life.

On a weekend during this season of Lent, members of my family experienced an emotional roller-coaster, marked by both death and new life. On the Friday, we gathered in prayer and remembrance to honour the life of our mother on the first anniversary of her death. One of my brothers was not able to be with us because he was at the hospital with his son and daughter-in-law, who had a few days earlier prematurely given birth at the five-month mark to twins, a boy and a girl. The tiny girl died on the afternoon of mom’s anniversary. The boy seemed to be doing better, but on Saturday his kidneys ceased to function.

Late Sunday morning we baptized a different baby boy born to a second brother’s son and wife. And in the afternoon we received word that the surviving twin had just died. At six o’clock that evening came yet more news: the daughter of a third brother had just given birth to a healthy son to whom she and her husband chose to give the name Francis, my deceased father’s name. Within the span of seven hours there was a Baptism, another death and a birth.  

Hezuk Shroff says he has been blessed with not one, but two vocations.

Born in Calcutta, India, in 1971, Shroff was raised in the Zoroastrian religion. When he came to Canada to attend McGill University in Montreal, he discovered the first of those vocations, a conversion to the Catholic faith.

While exploring his faith and the possibility of becoming a religious brother, Shroff was sent to Cebu in the Philippines to do missionary work. It was there he found his second and deeper vocation, a call to the priesthood.

“Father doesn’t have time for us,” said the youth of Cebu, according to Shroff. “Father is too busy running the parish.”

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI has decided the collection taken up at his Holy Thursday evening Mass will be used to help those affected by the devastating earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan.

The March 11 disaster left more than 13,000 people dead and another 13,700 unaccounted for. More than 150,000 were made homeless and many lost their jobs, especially in the fishing industry.

Each year, the Pope chooses where to send the collection taken up during the Mass of the Lord's Supper at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the diocese of Rome.

WARSAW, Poland - The world's most popular Christmas carol, "Silent Night," has been added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in recognition of its role in fostering cultural diversity.

"This is a song of freedom for the world, whose beautiful melody and text have inspired versions in more than 300 languages," Michael Neureiter, president of Austria's Silent Night Society, told Catholic News Service.

"Although it comes from the Catholic tradition, its calm, harmonic sound has made it accessible internationally. As such, it's not just a Christian song, but also a human song."

"Stille Nacht," or "Silent Night," was written as a poem in 1816 by Fr. Joseph Mohr in Mariapfarr, where he was assigned as an assistant parish priest. It premiered as a carol for two solo voices on Christmas Eve 1818 at the newly established St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, with music composed by the church organist, Franz Gruber.

With campaign jets soaring over the land and campaign buses rolling down highways, it’s sometimes easy for Canadians to be cynical about the honesty of politicians. But truth in politics still matters to Canadians, and politicians recognize it, said Prof. Richard Feist, dean of the faculty of philosophy at Ottawa’s Saint Paul University.

“The incumbent party certainly does not say something like, ‘Well, so what if we were defeated on non-confidence, or not providing (information).’ ” said Feist. “They want to talk as if ‘No, we were defeated on the budget.’ ”

Feist runs the Masters in Public Ethics program at Saint Paul, training civil servants in the philosophy of honesty. Truth, who tells the truth and whether citizens can recognize it, is important in how we run our politics and how we run our country, he said.

VATICAN CITY - A call to arms — to take up the weapons of the rosary and prayer — rang out at a recent international conference on exorcism in Rome.

The Church needs more training of both priests and laypeople in fighting the influence of the devil and bringing spiritual healing to those in need, attendees said.

"This is warfare. We've gotten way behind. We've lost the concept of spiritual warfare," said Msgr. Marvin Mottet, the official exorcist of the diocese of Davenport, Iowa.

The 80-year-old retired priest said that about once a month he sees a serious case of possession and "tons" of cases of demonic influence in which people are being "bothered or attacked by evil spirits." Those kinds of cases, he said, are "a daily thing."

WARSAW, Poland - The Vatican's representative to the Cote d'Ivoire has said Catholic priests have been targeted by armed groups during the current conflict, but added that he still hopes "full-scale civil war" can be avoided in the West African country.

In Rome, officials of Caritas Internationalis, the Church's charitable aid agency, said one of the priests kidnapped was Fr. Richard Kissi, diocesan director of Caritas in Abidjan, who was kidnapped March 29 by an armed group.

In a March 30 telephone interview, the nuncio, Archbishop Ambrose Madtha, told Catholic News Service, "I wouldn't call it a civil war as yet — the rebel army has been trying to attack certain cities, and this is why the violence is continuing."

He said students at the main Catholic seminary in Abidjan, the country's largest city, had been evacuated after its buildings were occupied by rebel soldiers. He added that a Catholic priest had been abducted while helping supervise the evacuation, while another had been attacked while returning from a late-night radio broadcast and had been hospitalized. He would not identify the priests by name.

Editor’s note: This is one in our series of profiles on the men who will graduate from St. Augustine’s Seminary this spring and be ordained to the priesthood for various dioceses.

When Paul Hrynczyszyn was 15, his mother forced him to attend a Catholic youth retreat over the March break. Now, 11 years later, he is about to be ordained a priest.

“I thank God and I thank her to this day for forcing me to go, because it was life changing,” he said.

“It was at that moment I rediscovered my faith. I fell in love with Jesus Christ.”