The word “hope” and the face of Pope Francis stood out in the coloured signs of over 500 children and youngsters who went down the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem on the morning of Friday 14 March. The annual Via Crucis of the pupils of the city’s Christian schools, at the start of Lent, was this year also a jubilee event, and an occasion to pray for the Pope’s health. There were also prayers for Fra Ayman, the deputy parish priest […]
For almost thirty years, the Magnificat Institute of Music has been open in the heart of Jerusalem; together with the other schools of the Custody of the Holy Land (the interview with fr. Badie of the Akko school is here; the interview with fr. George Haddad of the Bethehem school is here) it is an educational institution that is all the more necessary and fundamental in these times of dramatic conflicts, to teach peace and guarantee a future of coexistence […]
A few days after Christmas, on the morning of 27 December, the friars of the Custody of the Holy Land received their brothers of the Oriental Churches in the Chapter Hall of St Saviour’s convent for the traditional exchange of greetings. War and hope The topics of common reflection include: the second Christmas of war, the commitment to peace, the canonization of the martyrs of Damascus and the recent events in Syria, but also the Jubilee on hope and the […]
On the sixth centenary of the establishment of the Commissars of the Holy Land on 14 February 1421, by Pope Martin V, the Holy Father has sent a signed letter to the Custos of the Holy Land, Fr. Francesco Patton, to “support and bless this precious service.” Fr. Patton replied to Pope Francis’s message, dated 2 February, the next day, in which he informed the Holy Father of the intention to celebrate a Mass at the Edicule of the Sepulchre […]
