LENT
England: for Cambodian children orphaned AidsThe traditional Fast Day promoted by Catholic Charity organizations to help the Third World will be held on March 6. This weekend all the churches will hand out envelopes where to collect the equivalent amount of that day’s lunch or dinner. All the money collected will go to Cambodian children who remained orphans because of Aids. Cafod web site and Fast day posters tell the story of Phalla who lost all the members of her family due to the Red KhmerI’s atrocities and was imprisoned and tortured. Today she has five children of her own and is the foster mother of eight children orphaned by Aids. Taking care of them gives meaning to her life and the help she receives from charities such as Cafod enables her to buy food, clothes and school books for them. Cafod has more Lent initiatives underway: among the most curious one is that of making a twenty minutes interruption each day to mark how peace can be found only through God. During the forty days that separate us from Easter Cafod will send requesters liturgies of the Word. Also the Church of England is using “social networking” sites to promote Lent’s silence. The church will send from “Twitter” site small messages asking people to do generosity deeds. In 2007 more than 130,000 people participated in the initiativePortugal: close to poor familiesSpecific consequences of the financial and economic world crisis on the Portuguese society has been the main concern of the Bishop’s Lent messages. Christian and joint care emerges especially from the Lent proceeds collected in different parishes. Bishop of Algarve, Monsignor Quintas supports the family hit by the recession recalling that “Christian cannot remain deaf to the poor people’s requests and close their hearts to suffering:” Monsignor Manuel Pelino, bishop of Santarèm, pressed believers to consider “the crisis as an opportunity to review the current social consumerism model, enacting a simpler and more austere, less self-centred and more far-reaching Evangelic life style “. Lisbon’s dioceses decided to allocate Lent funds for the children of “Casa do Gaiato”, that promotes education and social inclusion for needy youngsters and teen-agers who risk social deviation. Also Coimbra decided to support smaller children in Casa de Mira, Obra de Frei. It helps unemployed parents by organizing a summer camp. Tacking an increase in aid requests, some dioceses have already created Social Dioceses Funds. With the help of Caritas, Monsignor Jorge Ortiga, archbishop of Barga, decided to set up the Casa Alavanca, where “throughout the year all objects will be gathered deemed useful for poor people, but superfluous for other families”. On his part, Monsignor Manuel Clemente, bishop of Porto made on his network (www.youtube.com/dioporto), a clear and decisive appeal defending workers , asking businesses to look for “creative and practical answers, to possible closures and lay-offs with the pretext of the crisis”. The bishops are aware that the crisis also involves other Portuguese-speaking countries and thus created other initiatives: Aveiro, decided to help the Bengalese Church (Angola) which has been in a priest sharing project, while the Portalegre-Castelo Branco dioceses decided to advocate a development project on poultry farms in São Tomé and Príncipe together with the Caritas office in the African archipelago.Eastern Churches: Help from US Churches”Fall into the Spirit of love”, is the slogan of 2009 Fund raising project for the European Central and Eastern Church inaugurated on February 25, Ashes Wednesday, promoted by the Catholic Bishop Conference in the US. The initiative is in line with last year’s when 6.8 million dollars where collected and used to fund 335 projects in 28 countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Latvia and Byelorussia. Priority was obviously given to poorer countries such as Moldavia, Albania and Kyrgyztan. Many of the projects of 2008, the International agency Fides explained , were centred on street children and health-care facilities for elderly people, through Caritas Tibilsi (Georgia) like a new heating system for Aviv’s seminar in Ukraine, saving high costs of Russian natural gas. A contribution was also allocated to the Latvian Catholic TV.
