Pope Stresses Selfless Service

National Catholic Register (ncregister.com)

Pope Stresses Selfless Service to Youth at Holy Thursday Mass

The Holy Father opened the Triduum by spending it with young men and women at a youth detention center in Rome.

by EDWARD PENTIN 03/28/2013
Rome Reports

Pope Francis delivers his Holy Thursday homily at Casa del Marmo youth detention center in Rome.

– Rome Reports

VATICAN CITY — At a young people’s detention center just outside of Rome this evening, Pope Francis urged a group of jailed teens to be at the service of one another, reminding them that Jesus came to serve and help mankind.

The Holy Father made the comments at the Casa del Marmo youth detention center, where he celebrated the Mass of Our Lord’s Supper for 50 young offenders, including 11 girls, as well as staff, volunteers and dignitaries.

Among those concelebrating the Mass with the Holy Father were the vicar of Rome, Cardinal Agostino Vallini; the deputy secretary of state, Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu; private secretary Msgr. Alfred Xuereb; and the detention center chaplain, Father Gaetano Greco.

The Vatican said that during the Mass the Pope “washed the feet of 12 young guests of the penal institute, of different nationalities and religious confessions, among them two girls.”

The decision to celebrate the Mass there was a break with papal tradition, which is normally celebrated in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. The Holy Father has not yet formally taken possession of the basilica as the bishop of Rome.

In his unscripted homily, Pope Francis recalled the “moving” washing of the feet by Jesus and the Lord’s explanation of his action.

“Jesus washes the feet of his disciples,” he recounted. “Peter understands nothing. He refuses, but Jesus explains to him. Jesus, God, did this, and he himself explains it to the disciples: ‘Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me teacher and master, and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.’”

The Holy Father explained that the foot-washing is important for Jesus “because among us the one who is highest up must be at the service of others.”

“This is a symbol; it is a sign — washing your feet means I am at your service,” he said. “And we are too, among each other, but we don’t have to wash each other’s feet each day. So what does this mean? That we have to help each other.”

“Sometimes I would get angry with someone, but we must let it go; and if they ask a favor of you, do it!” the Pope said.

‘Help One Another’

He continued, “Help one another. This is what Jesus teaches us. This is what I do. And I do it with my heart. I do this with my heart because it is my duty. As a priest and bishop, I must be at your service. But it is a duty that comes from my heart and a duty I love. I love doing it because this is what the Lord has taught me. But you too must help us and help each other, always. And thus, in helping each other, we will do good for each other.”

In closing, the Pope said the ceremony of the washing of the feet should prompt each person to question, “Am I really willing to help others? Just think of that. Think that this sign is Christ’s caress, because Jesus came just for this: to serve us, to help us.”

As cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis would celebrate the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in prisons or hospices and sometimes wash the feet of girls. This is in variance from the normal canonical practice that only men should have their feet washed, as it signifies the fact that Christ’s apostles were all male.

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass in the Casa del Marmo during Lent in 2007.

Since his election, Pope Francis has sought to encourage the Church to look outwards more, and he reminded Catholics of the Church’s special role in caring for the poor and marginalized.

Presents for the Pope

At the end of Mass, before returning to the Vatican, Pope Francis met members of the institute, as well as government ministers in the prison gym. The boys in the prison gave the Pope a wooden crucifix and a kneeler that they had made in the institute workshop.

The Mass of the Lord’s Supper marks the beginning of the Easter Triduum. Tomorrow afternoon, the Holy Father will celebrate the Passion of the Lord in St. Peter’s Basilica, and, in the evening, he will lead the Via Crucis at the Colosseum.

Edward Pentin is the Register’s Rome correspondent.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-stresses-selfless-service-to-youth-at-holy-thursday-mass/#ixzz2OtrbFP2U

Did the Pope Bless Slavery?

 Click this to read the Paper

There I was sitting in my Louisiana History class and on the power point I saw the words : Pope Blessed Slavery. This was part of my teacher's lecture at my local college. Being a Catholic I could see that this was based on nothing. I did not know the technical details, but I knew that Our Lord would not give the keys to the kingdom of heaven and authority on earth just so one of the later popes could blow it on slavery. I knew that the gates of hell would never prevail against Holy Mother Church.

My class was assigned a topic of our choice for a term paper so I naturally chose slavery knowing that as a result I probably would not make the greatest grade, but I could at least live with expressing the truth about the matter.

As a result I was basically told as well as written on my paper in the traditional red ink (not verbatim): ' Jee that is a lot of new information I've never seen before and I still don't fully believe you, ...but I will take that out of my lecture." (Bold was written)

It was really difficult even establishing the topic because when she questioned me about it I could tell she probably wanted some kind of strong response from me like "I can't believe you actually think I should belong to a belief that ever supported slavery!" Thankfully our Lord's grace was with me and I was able to handle the truth with ease.

'Person-hood' that is truly the underlying topic: Did the Roman Catholic Church ever neglect the person-hood of human beings? We see the Church defending life on terms of the abortion of children in the womb and euthanasia and we see the Church love and respect the lives of the poor, but I was considerably glad to establish here in my paper: 'Slavery in Louisiana and Roman Catholic Teaching' that the Church in her long standing tradition of defending and valuing the person-hood of every human being did so even there in history when it was so obviously neglected within the years of 1700 to 1865 in the United States of America.

Good man links

Being your own man

How not to be an absentee father

How to be assertive

Why the Bibles between Catholics and Protestants are different.

This video has other reliable sources and is very informative
It is a brief history of the Bible.
 

'The Missing Books of the Bible' Click to read article

The 7 Books of the Bible that are omitted from Protestant Bibles
Catholics refer to this as "the Deuterocanonical Books"
Protestants refer to them as "the Apocrypha"

Tobit
Judith
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
Wisdom
Sirach
Baruch
Also in the Catholic " Deuterocanonical Books" are fuller versions of the Old Testament books of Daniel and Esther.


The colors indicate the sources of these writings everything in [brackets] are the meanings the authors conveyed.

 When was the Old Testament compiled? Some would decide for about the year 430 B.C., under Esdras and Nehemiah, resting upon the authority of the famous Jew, Josephus, who lived immediately after our Lord and who declares that since the death of Ataxerxes, 424 B.C., "No one had dared to add anything to the Jewish Scriptures, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them."

Alexander the Great ended Persian rule at the Battle of Issus (Syria) in 333 B.C. He established Greek rule and cultural influence by setting up a series of military colonies and founding Greek-style cities, the most important being Alexandria (331 B.C.) in Egypt. The Greek language and way of life began to penetrate the eastern Mediterranean world.

...The Jews, in spite of the tenacity of their own religious and cultural traditions, were also affected by this Hellenistic movement, particularly those scattered beyond the confines of Palestine.

... A Greek translation of the Biblical books appeared in Alexandria around 200 B.C. This became known as the Septuagint (from the Latin for 'seventy'), because of the legend that the translation had been done by seventy-two translators, six from each of the twelve tribes. The Septuagint became the Bible of the Jews of the Diaspora (those 'dispersed' in foreign lands). 

  Other authorities, again, contend that it was not till near 100 B.C. that the Old Testament volume was finally closed by the inclusion of the Writings.

 [Whether around 430 BC or 100 BC] one thing at least is certain, that by this last date--that is, for one hundred years before the birth of our Blessed Lord-- the Old Testament [46 books] existed precisely as we have it now.

It was later adopted by Christian missionaries when they took the Gospel into the Hellenistic world of the Roman Empire. The New Testament written in Greek, records 300 of its 350 quotations from the Septuagint version of the Old Testament instead of in direct translation from the Hebrew.

...During the formative days of the Christian Church, the Jews did not possess a formal or explicit canon of the Old Testament books. The Christian writers quoted the broad library of sacred writings used among contemporary Jews. The Jews continued their own discussions about the sacred books, and in the late second or early third century A.D. canonized the shorter collection that Jews and Protestants use today. Modern study by all parties to the current debate have raised questions about the correctness of this late Jewish decision to exclude some of the books which had been accepted as Scripture for more than 200 years.




  The Christians did not establish their Old Testament canon as early as the Jews. 
... The question of the Old Testament canon rested [with 46 books of the OT] during the next 1,000years until it was raised again by the reformers in the sixteenth century. 
  
[Within that 1,000 years] the seven firmly-established Old Testament books were repeatedly declared by numerous early Christian Councils [393, 397,417 A.D. etc...] to be the inspired Word of God, [these] were later deleted from the "Protestant" Old Testament canon decided by Martin Luther and successive Reformers more than eleven centuries later.

 [I]n debating purgatory with J. Maier of Eck (1519), it was Luther who broke with Church tradition and began a new era in discussions on the Old Testament canon... Confronted by 2 Macc 12:46 as 'scriptural proof' for the doctrine of purgatory, Luther rejected 2 Macc as Scripture.
             The early reformers were not eager to reject the ...[deuterocanonical books] altogether, since they had been in ecclesiastical use for more than a millenium.

 In his translation of 1534, Martin Luther grouped the deuterocanonical books together at the end of the Old Testament as books which 'are not held equal to the sacred scriptures and yet are useful and good for reading.' The Reformers, in deciding to get back to the situation at the time of the Church's origin, wanted to adopt as scripture the books that made up the Old Testament used by the early Christians. They presumed that the books revered by the Jews of their own time had always been the canonical Old Testament, and so the shorter list of books became the Old Testament of the Reformers. They did not know that the decision for a shorter Old Testament canon had been late in coming, and that during the first century both Jews and Christians held a wider selection of Old Testament books. In reaction to the Reformers, the Council of Trent in 1546 [formally] defined the longer Old Testament canon as inspired scripture."
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Special thanks to the book:
Unabridged Christianity
By Fr. Mario Romero
Where the green and yellow sources came from

The Catholic Bible Study Handbook
by
Jerome Kodell, O.S.B. 

Where We Got the Bible: Our debt to the Catholic Church
by
Henry G. Graham

The New Jerome Biblical Commentary
(editors) Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, and Roland Murphy 

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What Are good Catholic Bibles?

We love you Pope Benedict XVI !

I will forever miss the Pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI

A Visual gift from the Vatican to everyone who loves our Holy Father, now Cardinal Ratzinger

http://www.vatican.va/bxvi/omaggio/index_en.html