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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The 12 women whose feet were washed by Pope Francis included women from Italy, Bulgaria, Nigeria, Ukraine, Russia, Peru, Venezuela and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"We, the members of the Society of Jesus, continue to be lifted up in prayer, in lament, in protest at the death and destruction that continue to reign in Gaza and other territories in Israel/Palestine, spilling over into the surrounding countries of the Middle East."
While some children have been evacuated from conflict, more than 1.1 million children in Gaza and 3.7 million in Haiti have been left behind to face the rampaging adult world around them.
Easter will not be postponed this year. It will not wait until the war is over. It is precisely now, in our darkest hour, that resurrection finds us.