Deciding to embark on a radical and irreversible path of life is never easy, as are listening to and recognizing your vocation. Fiancés know this before saying “I do” at their wedding, as do the aspiring priests on their path towards ordination. This decision, together with waiting for the big day, was also experienced in Jerusalem by ten Franciscan friars who, on Wednesday 29 June, on the feast of St Peter and St Paul, in the church of St Saviour’s Convent, […]
Every year on 10 July, the liturgical calendar of the Custody of the Holy Land commemorates the “Martyrs of Damascus” : eight friars minor and three lay Maronites, killed “in hatred of the faith” on the night between 9 and 10 July 1860. Pius XI beatified them in 1926. The story of the martyrs Violence broke out in Damascus in 1860 in a context of persecution by the Shiite Druze, which from Lebanon had spread to Syria. Thousands of Christians […]
