Poland

“Spiritual tweets” dedicated to the Holy VirginAt the beginning of this year and drawing inspiration from an initiative born in Spain, five Polish priests have created a spiritual and religious Twitter profile, @duchowni. They have for the first time undertaken 140 character-long spiritual exercises during Lent. Now in conjunction with the Marian month of May, they tweet daily calls to meditation over one of the invocations of the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary.Archbishop Jozef Michalik, Archbishop of Przemysl and president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, gave his immediate support to the initiative, tweeting that “Mary is the best, the most beautiful and safest way that leads to Christ”. The prelate has for over a year published “spiritual tweets” regularly on his profile @AbpJMichalik which has reached 2,500 followers.”It was not easy to select the 31 invocations, one for each day of the month of May, but in the end we agreed: on the 1st of May, we tweeted to ‘Holiest Mary’, on May 2nd to the ‘Holy Mother of God’, while on the 3rd of May to ‘Mary Queen of Poland’,” said one of the promoters of the initiative, Piotr Studnicki, adding that their aim is “to present the profound significance of the individual invocations of the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary”. Moreover, during this month the profile’s moderators will retweet the most interesting contributions from all those who wish to participate in the meditation.Devotion to the Virgin Mary is deeply felt in Poland, where the invocation of Queen of Poland was added at the end of the invocations of the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary originally approved by Pope Sixtus V. This title of Mary was officially recognized by the Holy See in 1923 after Poland regained its sovereignty with the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the Great War. In 1980 the Holy See approved the invocation of Mary Mother of the Church, and it was the expressed desire of Pope John Paul II to add that of Queen of the family in 1995.Between March 18th and 24th, the spiritual exercises of the @duchowni Twitter profile were dedicated instead to the “Seven gates of Jerusalem”. The moderators invited to reflect each day on one of the moments of encounter between man and God. The first tweets were devoted to the sacrament of confession. Later on, the reflection was centered on the theme of suffering. In the following days the other themes were prayer, community, and sex. The sixth day of reflection was dedicated to silence while the seventh day to the Eucharist..The idea of practicing spiritual exercises through a microblog came up during a Skype discussion between some priests (two of which belong to the Society of Jesus), who quickly got another fifteen prelates involved in the initiative”.We want to bring Christ to as many people as possible,” explained one of them who likened the initiative to the “Court of the Gentiles”. Interest in the pastoral use of micro-blogging in Poland has grown considerably after the launch of Benedict XVI’s, Twitter profile, and support for it is growing steadily. Currently, over 200 priests are active on Twitter, while @duchowni has tweeted over 1,500 times and has over 1,000 followers.The ties with the Lithuanian Church”We can and we must be witnesses of hope for all those who seek a meaning to their life and who are facing difficult challenges”. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz said on Sunday, May 5th in Kaunas, Lithuania. Pope Francis confirmed him as papal legate for the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Archcathedral dedicated to the holy apostles Peter and Paul. In his letter to cardinal Dziwisz, the Pope recalled how at the time of the communist regime’s hostility toward the Church the Archcathedral of Kaunas had been a symbol of the need to preserve Christianity and loyalty to the Holy See on a territory which was then part of the Soviet Union. Cardinal Dziwisz, currently Archbishop of Krakow and also former secretary of John Paul II, recalled Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Lithuania in September 1993 in his homily and stressed the importance of the links between the Church in Poland and Lithuania. He also noted that in the Year of Faith “we are all called to deepen and enliven our faith so that we can share it with others”. “We cannot be indifferent to the fact that many people are infected with secularist ideas and live as if God did not exist, as if he had nothing to tell us and as if we could carry out the work of salvation by ourselves”, the prelate added. Lithuania was the last European country to convert to Christianity in 1387. Catholics make up 79% of the Lithuanian population, followed by atheists and agnostics at 15%, while 4% are Orthodox and 2% are Protestant.