Turkey, Ireland, Portugal

Turkey: Mgr. Padovese, waiting for the trial”There is no news of a trial against the person who murdered mgr. Padovese. Investigations may be going on but we not know anything at all. Murat Altun was sent to Istanbul for an additional medical report. We are waiting to hear something”. Over six months after the brutish murder of mgr. Luigi Padovese, killed by his driver Murat Altun in Iskenderun, the situation is summed up for SIR Europe by father Domenico Bertogli, parish priest of Antioch, who calls again for “a fair trial that will establish the truth about what happened, and above all far from the limelight”. In the meantime, the life of the local Catholic community goes on: “on 23rd January, we met, along with the other Christian denominations, to celebrate Saint Paul’s conversion and the Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians”. “These are – the parish priest states – the special moments in which our churches, with the very few devotees they have, can meet and regain confidence and hope in the future. There’s no need to repeat that we are a very small minority who often feels deserted. We are anxiously waiting for the bishop who will replace mgr. Padovese”. “In February – father Bertogli goes on -, pilgrimages to Tarsus and to Antioch, here, will also be resumed. The arrivals will be opened by a Spanish group with their bishop next week. Their coming here makes us feel part of the Universal Church. Then, yesterday some ministers of the Turkish government and the Speaker of the Chamber came to visit us. They have been very friendly. We appreciated such gesture, which would have been unthinkable until just a few yeas ago”.Ireland: the Week of Catholic SchoolsStarting on next Sunday, 30th January, the Irish Catholic Church will be celebrating the Week of Catholic Schools, due to end on 5th February. The theme, “Catholic schools. Rooted in Jesus Christ”, takes inspiration from Benedict XVI’s pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland that was published on 20th March, 2010. In Section 9, Benedict XVI tells Irish children and youth that “Jesus Christ loves you and offered you Himself on the Cross for you” and encourages them to “look for a personal relationship with Him, because He will never betray your trust. He is the only one who can fulfil your deepest wishes”. Irish schools, parishes and families will receive resources to celebrate the Week. On Wednesday, 2nd February, primary schools will be encouraged to invite the pupils’ grandparents to celebrate the Week along with their grandchildren. Distributed resources will include suggestions for prayers, reflections on the Catholic traditions of the school, liturgical ideas for prayer and the Eucharist, crosswords and riddles. There will also be a guided reflection on the Pope’s pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland. This year, secondary-school students will be suggested to prepare, either individually or in groups, a presentation of the school’s history, the achievements of its staff and students, and the school’s patron saint.Portugal: “Mãe Clara”‘s exampleIn the Special Supplement devoted by the agency Ecclesia to the future beatification of sister Mary Clare of the Child Jesus (1843-1899), João César das Neves, author of the book “The Saints of Portugal”, calls the Franciscan sister “a paragon of Christian attitude against injustice and suffering”. The professor of the Catholic University thinks that “the fundamental factor in the work of Mãe Clara, the name with which she is more widely known, that will finally give her a place in the history of Portugal is the thousands and thousands of poor and sick people, abandoned children and wretches that she took, treated, helped and guided in faith and towards hope”. Libânia do Carmo Galvão Mexia de Moura Telles e Albuquerque was born in Lisbon on 15th June 1843 and took on the Capuchin habit in 1869, with the name of sister Maria Clara do Menino Jesus. On 3rd May 1871, she founded in Lisbon the first community of the Congregation of the Franciscan Hospitaller Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, which was approved by the Holy See in 1876. She opened lots of shelters for the poor and the needy, giving a missionary boost to her Congregation in Angola, in India (Goa) and in Guinea-Bissau. The miracle that has been attributed to her took place in Baiona, in Spanish Galicia, on 12th November 2003, and was reported by a devotee who in 1988 had gone to her grave and prayed her to intercede in curing the pyoderma gangrenosum which had been giving her sharp pains in an arm for 34 years. “Because she died in Lisbon on 1st December 1899 – João César das Neves recalls -, Mother Clare lived through the era of liberal power, and her Congregation was ferociously attacked during the persecutions that were unleashed against the Portuguese Church. However, despite the basest and most humiliating slander being spread about her and her sisters, she never failed to be strong, worthy, firm and cautious, a superior paragon that even today opposes to any form of abuse and oppression”.