At the Holy Sepulchre the Easter Vigil is celebrated on Saturday morning, and not during the night, as happens in the rest of the world. This particularity is due to the Status Quo, the complex system of historical norms that regulates the coexistence, spaces and times of the different Christian confessions present in the Holy Places. The morning celebration also preserves an ancient liturgical practice of the Latin Church, prior to the reforms of Pius XII in the 1950s, when […]
There is an image that I cannot forget. I was on retreat at the hermitage of Gethsemane - right there at the foot of the Mount of Olives, where Jesus sweated blood on the night of his betrayal - when I saw a Franciscan friar doing a very simple thing: during Mass he recorded his homily. Not for himself, but to send it via message to his contacts, so that that Word would not remain closed within the stone walls […]
Dear brothers and sisters, may the risen Lord grant you his peace. In this Easter, celebrated here in the Holy Land in a time marked by so many wounds and sufferings, we are called to live the resurrection of Christ not only as an event of the past, but as an occurrence that reaches us today, in this concrete situation, and that brings with it a judgment on our history and on our life. Saint Peter, in the Acts of the Apostles, announcing Jesus to the family of the centurion […]
On Sunday, February 22, all the friars of the Custody present in the houses in Italy – Naples, Rome (Delegation), and Montefalco – together with our students from Assisi and Florence, gathered for a day of fraternity on the occasion of the ostension of the body of Saint Francis of Assisi at the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. The day began with lunch together in Montefalco, a joyful and fraternal moment shared also with the five postulants of the […]
