Women work with disabled children in North Africa, desiring to transmit God’s love through physical therapy.

While praying for her dad to have a spiritual dream, one Muslim background believer dreams of Jesus and surrenders her own life to Him.

Long-term OM workers organize weekends of intercessory art, helping community connect creativity and prayer.

OM workers in North Africa explain they have peace even during times of political unrest.

Professional experience as a teacher and personal relationships on the field equipped one long-term worker to teach at a start-up English-speaking school.

God answers a long-term worker’s prayer for an outreach day in Spain, connecting her with people from her host country in North Africa.

Transform participants travel to North African countries, experiencing the culture and learning about different ways to share God’s love.

Ethnomusicologists visited a North African country to help local singers and a Sudanese Nubian believer write a worship song in his language and style.

Short-term participant uses Transform trip to confirm God’s call for long-term work in North Africa.

OM workers share how God answered prayers for visas to stay in North Africa.

By offering a creative class for women, an OM worker finds ways to transform broken tiles into art and make relationships where she can share God’s truth.

Workers find business opportunities using local products and model a lifestyle of integrity and love.

When a worker apologises for a loud in-home worship gathering, her neighbour responds with the desire to attend church.

Prayer walking in a North African city brings some encouraging insights for a long term worker and her daughter

Workers encourage new believers to persevere in their faith despite facing persecution from their families.

An OM evangelist follows God to North Africa and pioneers ministry among students and seekers in a new city.

God uses a Latino-American couple to gather and train local believers, who form a small church in North Africa.

God uses a Latino-American couple to gather and train local believers, who form a small church in North Africa.

10 challenges, 3 people, 0 phones and 1 awesome God.

An OM worker visits an islamic university while trying to build a deeper relationship with a religious friend.

Worker shares how OM’s storytelling course revitalised her English classes and friendships.

A new generation of Sudanese church planters, trained by an Arab OMer in North Africa, revive OM’s ministry in north Sudan.

Lila from Argentina wanted to go on a mission trip, but always had a reason not to. Then she found the opportunity to serve refugees.

After eight months of maintenance and improvements to prepare the vessel for future service, Logos Hope sets sail from Subic Bay, Philippines.

OM Ships partners with Christian ministries and celebrates four years of service for Logos Hope.

Name: Lynchee Buakham Home: Chaing Rai,Thailand Born in: April 1983 Joined OM Ships: January 2013 Previous employment: Marketing assistant Current job on board: Hotel Services team member

Madeleine Coetzer, who has served on Logos Hope for two years, tells how the Lord has changed her life.

OM Ships International celebrates five years of God’s faithfulness through the ministry of Logos Hope around the world.

Name: Sam Castro Home: Pachuca, Mexico Born in: March 1988 Joined OM Ships: September 2013 Previous employment: Veterinarian Current job on board: Shift leader in the book fair

OM Ships completes the ‘Power Up’ project and re-launches Logos Hope into active ministry.

Former Logos Hope port volunteer Swens Wong discovers God’s creativity in his cake-baking business and uses his creations, and story, to bring God glory.

The world’s largest floating book fair welcomes its five millionth visitor as the tour of Asia comes to a conclusion.

OM’s ships connect with local churches in every port of call. Existing fellowships have added new believers, and new churches have been planted in the wake of a ship visit.

Seventeen years after the Ship Ministry sailed into service, OM suffered the loss of Logos at sea. But partners around the world were adamant the work should continue, and gave generously to replace the vessel with something better.

Mosbach, Germany :: OM Ships announces the appointment of Seelan Govender as Chief Executive Officer.

In 1999, national bitterness and divisions were set aside on board Doulos, which facilitated an historic reconciliation after conflict in the Pacific islands.

OM Peru completed their summer medical outreach in Trujillo, Peru. They saw over 350 patients and 60 people commit to the Lord.

A team of volunteers and doctors attended to over 300 people in a town almost destroyed by an earthquake in 2007.

At the end of July, OM Peru helped build a church, share God's love with the surrounding community and speak in a missions conference.

On a recent outreach to several towns in the Amazon jungle, OM Peru worked with the Presbyterian Church of Moyabamba and its annexes.

Forty women climb Machu Picchu to raise awareness about human trafficking during a five-day Freedom Challenge trek in Peru.

Online diagramming app Lucidchart supports real-time collaborative editing, has well-stocked libraries of templates and objects, and offers many options for exporting and presenting your diagrams.

RingCentral Fax offers lots of pages per month and a modern multi-platform experience, but it costs a lot per month and its fax quality could be better.

Vatican City, May 4, 2020 / 07:29 am (CNA).- Jesus died for everyone, but disordered attachment to one’s own ideas can cause divisions which break the unity of God’s people, Pope Francis said at Mass on Monday.

“There are ideas, positions that create division, to the point that the division is more important than unity,” the pope said May 4. People think “my idea is more important than the Holy Spirit who guides us.”

Francis called division a “disease of the Church, a disease which arises from ideologies or religious factions…”

Throughout the Church’s history there has always been a spirit of thinking one’s self to be righteous and others to be sinners, he said, describing it as an “us and the others” attitude, which says others are already condemned, while “we have the right position before God.”

Speaking from the chapel of his Vatican residence, the Casa Santa Marta, Francis emphasized that Jesus died for everyone.

Imagining a dialogue with someone questioning the statement, he said, “‘But did [Jesus] also die for that low-life who made my life impossible?’ He died for him too. ‘And for that crook?’ He died for him.”

“For everyone,” Francis underlined. “And also for people who do not believe in him or are of other religions: he died for everyone.”

Without using a name, the pope referenced a retired cardinal living inside the Vatican, who, he said, likes to say “the Church is like a river,” with different people being like different parts of the river.

“But the important thing is that everyone is inside the river,” the pope said. “This is the unity of the Church.”

The Church is a wide river, “because the Lord wants it so.”

Pope Francis quoted a verse from the day’s Gospel reading, John 10:11-18, when Jesus says: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

Jesus is saying “I am Shepherd of everyone,” the pope explained. “Everyone: Big and small, rich and poor, good and bad.”

Pointing to the divisions in the Church after the Second Vatican Council, he said it is permissible to think differently from one another, but always “in the unity of the Church, under Jesus the Shepherd.”

He prayed that the Lord would free Catholics from the illness of division and help them to see “this great thing from Jesus, that in him we are all brothers and he is the Shepherd of all.”

Pope Francis offered the day’s Mass for families, that in this time of quarantine because of the coronavirus pandemic they will continue to try new and creative things together and with their children.

He also acknowledged the reality of domestic violence, asking for prayers for families “to continue in peace with creativity and patience in this quarantine.”

After Mass the pope led those following the Mass via livestream in an act of spiritual communion. He concluded with Eucharistic adoration and benediction.

 

CNA Staff, May 4, 2020 / 11:45 am (CNA).- Modern society is formulating an “anti-Christian creed” and punishing those who resist it with “social excommunication,” Benedict XVI has said in a new biography, published in Germany May 4.

In a wide-ranging interview at the end of the 1,184-page book, written by German author Peter Seewald, the pope emeritus said the greatest threat facing the Church was a “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies.”

Benedict XVI, who resigned as pope in 2013, made the comment in response to a question about what he had meant at his 2005 inauguration, when he urged Catholics to pray for him “that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”

He told Seewald that he was not referring to internal Church matters, such as the "Vatileaks" scandal, which led to the conviction of his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, for stealing confidential Vatican documents. 

In an advanced copy of “Benedikt XVI - Ein Leben” (A Life), seen by CNA, the pope emeritus said: “Of course, issues such as ‘Vatileaks’ are exasperating and, above all, incomprehensible and highly disturbing to people in the world at large.”

“But the real threat to the Church and thus to the ministry of St. Peter consists not in these things, but in the worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies, and to contradict them constitutes exclusion from the basic social consensus.”

He continued: “A hundred years ago, everyone would have thought it absurd to speak of homosexual marriage. Today whoever opposes it is socially excommunicated. The same applies to abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory.”

“Modern society is in the process of formulating an ‘anti-Christian creed,’ and resisting it is punishable by social excommunication. The fear of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is therefore only too natural, and it truly takes the prayers of a whole diocese and the universal Church to resist it.”

The biography, issued by Munich-based publisher Droemer Knaur, is available only in German. An English translation, “Benedict XVI, The Biography: Volume One,” will be published in the U.S. on Nov. 17.

In the interview, the 93-year-old former pope confirmed that he had written a spiritual testament, which could be published after his death, as did Pope St. John Paul II.

Benedict said that he had fast-tracked the cause of John Paul II because of “the obvious desire of the faithful” as well as the example of the Polish pope, with whom he had worked closely for more than two decades in Rome.

He insisted that his resignation had “absolutely nothing” to do with the episode involving Paolo Gabriele, and explained that his 2010 visit to the tomb of Celestine V, the last pope to resign before Benedict XVI, was “rather coincidental.” He also defended the title “emeritus” for a retired pope.

Benedict XVI lamented the reaction to his various public comments since his resignation, citing criticism of his tribute read at the funeral of Cardinal Joachim Meisner in 2017, in which he said that God would prevent the ship of the Church from capsizing. He explained that his words were “taken almost literally from the sermons of St. Gregory the Great.”

Seewald asked the pope emeritus to comment on the “dubia” submitted by four cardinals, including Cardinal Meisner, to Pope Francis in 2016 regarding the interpretation of his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia.

Benedict said that he did not want to comment directly, but referred to his last general audience, on Feb. 27, 2013.

Summing up his message that day, he  said: “In the Church, amid all the toils of humanity and the confusing power of the evil spirit, one will always be able to discern the subtle power of God's goodness.”

“But the darkness of successive historical periods will never allow the unadulterated joy of being a Christian ... There are always moments in the Church and in the life of the individual Christian in which one feels profoundly that the Lord loves us, and this love is joy, is ‘happiness’.”

Benedict said that he treasured the memory of his first meeting with the newly elected Pope Francis at Castel Gandolfo and that his personal friendship with his successor has continued to grow.

Author Peter Seewald has conducted four book-length interviews with Benedict XVI. The first, “Salt of the Earth,” was published in 1997, when the future pope was prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was followed by “God and the World” in 2002, and “Light of the World” in 2010.

In 2016, Seewald published “Last Testament,” in which Benedict XVI reflected on his decision to step down as pope.

Publisher Droemer Knaur said that Seewald had spent many hours talking to Benedict for the new book, as well as speaking to his brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger and his personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein.

In an interview with Die Tagespost April 30, Seewald said that he had shown the Pope Emeritus a few chapters of the book before publication. Benedict XVI, he added, had praised the chapter on Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.
 

 

CNA Staff, May 4, 2020 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has ordered 15 psychiatric hospitals in Belgium which belong to the Brothers of Charity to cease identifying as Catholic institutions after they allowed the euthanization of patients in 2017.

The hospitals are managed by a civil non-profit corporation with the same name as the Brothers of Charity religious congregation which owns them.

The CDF decision was communicated in a letter dated March 30, stating that "with deep sadness" the "psychiatric hospitals managed by the Provincialate of the Brothers of Charity association in Belgium will no longer be able to consider themselves Catholic institutions."

In a statement responding to the CDF's decision, the superior general of the Brothers of Charity, Br. René Stockman, said that "with a heavy heart" the religious congregation "must let go of its psychiatric centers in Belgium."

Br. Stockman pointed out that it is "painful" that the psychiatric centers of the Brothers of Charity in Belgium have lost their Catholic status, considering also that the brothers "were among the pioneers in the field of mental health care in Belgium."

At the same time, Stockman said he recognizes that "the congregation [the Brothers of Charity] has no choice but to remain faithful to the charism of charity, which cannot be reconciled with the practice of euthanasia on psychiatric patients."

The decision by the Vatican's doctrinal office ends three years of disputes between the Brothers of Charity and the corporation which manages their hospitals in Belgium.

In 2017, the board decided to allow euthanasia to be carried out in its hospitals in Belgium, where the euthanasia law is among the most broad.

At the time of the decision, the board of the corporation was composed of 15 members, with only three of them religious brothers of the congregation. 

Two of the three religious brothers among the board members, Luc Lemmens, 61, and Veron Raes, 57, supported the euthanasia decision. Their terms on the board ended at the end of September 2018 and were not renewed.

The religious congregation, especially Stockman, protested the decision, reiterating the Brothers of Charity's rejection of euthanasia in their hospitals.

The brothers appealed to the Vatican, which asked the psychiatric hospitals to change their protocol allowing euthanasia as “a medical act” under certain conditions.

The hospital management responded with a long statement in September 2017, in which it contested a lack of dialogue and maintained the hospital was "perfectly consistent" with Christian doctrine.

The CDF's direction that the hospitals must no longer identify as Catholic was communicated in a letter signed by CDF prefect Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer and secretary Archbishop Giacomo Morandi.

The letter retraced the developments of the story, recalling that the document allowing euthanasia in the brothers' hospitals "refers neither to God, nor to Holy Scripture, nor to the Christian vision of Man."

According to the letter, the CDF had spoken with the Brothers of Charity and had also informed Pope Francis of the gravity of the situation.

Other audiences had also taken place beginning June 2017, including with the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the Secretariat of State, the representatives of the Brothers of Charity and the managing corporation, as well as representatives of the Belgian bishops' conference.

The Holy See also sent Bishop Jan Hendriks, auxiliary of Amsterdam, as an apostolic visitor, but he did not register any steps forward nor a desire to find "a viable solution that avoids any form of responsibility of the institution for euthanasia."

The request of the CDF to the Brothers of Charity and to the managing corporation was clear: “affirm in writing and in an unequivocal way their adherence to the principles of the sacredness of human life and the unacceptability of euthanasia, and, as a consequence, the absolute refusal to carry it out in the institutions they depend on."

The corporation "did not give assurance on these points."

The CDF therefore reiterated that "euthanasia remains an inadmissible act, even in extreme cases," and strengthened the statement by citing St. John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, and a Jan. 30 speech by Pope Francis to the CDF.

The CDF stressed that "Catholic teaching affirms the sacred value of human life," the "importance of caring for and accompanying the sick and disabled," as well as "the Christian value of suffering, the moral unacceptability of euthanasia" and "the impossibility of introducing this practice in Catholic hospitals, not even in extreme cases, as well as of collaborating in this regard with civil institutions."

The Brothers of Charity is a religious congregation of lay brothers founded in 1807 in Belgium, whose specialization is care for the sick and those with psychiatric diseases.

At the congregation's July 2018 general chapter the group stressed that the Brothers of Charity "believes in sacredness and absolute respect for every human life, from conception to natural death. The general chapter requires that each brother, associate member and others associated with the mission of the congregation adhere to the doctrine of the Catholic Church on ethical issues."

Vatican City, May 5, 2020 / 03:30 am (CNA).- Pope Francis prayed for those who have died alone during the coronavirus pandemic at his morning Mass Tuesday.

At the start of Mass in the chapel at Casa Santa Marta, his Vatican residence, he said May 5: "Today we pray for the deceased who have died because of the pandemic. They have died alone, without the caresses of their loved ones. So many did not even have a funeral. May the Lord welcome them in His glory."

More than 250,000 people have died of COVID-19 worldwide as of May 5, according to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.

In his homily, the pope reflected on the day’s Gospel reading (John 10:22-30), in which Jesus is asked to declare openly whether he is the Christ. Jesus replies that he has already told his listeners, but they have not believed him because they are not among his sheep.  

Pope Francis urged Catholics to ask themselves: “What makes me stop outside the door that is Jesus?”

One major obstacle is wealth, the pope said.

“There are many of us who have entered the door of the Lord but then fail to continue because we are imprisoned by wealth,” he said, according to a transcript by Vatican News. 

“Jesus takes a hard line regarding wealth… Wealth keeps us from going ahead. Do we need to fall into poverty? No, but, we must not become slaves to wealth. Wealth is the lord of this world, and we cannot serve two masters.”

The pope added that another barrier to progress towards Jesus is rigidity of heart.  

He said: “Jesus reproached the doctors of the law for their rigidity in interpreting the law, which is not faithfulness. Faithfulness is always a gift of God; rigidity is only security for oneself.”

As an example of rigidity, the pope recalled that once when he visited a parish a woman asked him whether attending a Saturday afternoon nuptial Mass fulfilled her Sunday obligation. The readings were different to those on Sunday so she worried that she might have committed a mortal sin. 

Rigidity leads us away from the wisdom of Jesus and robs us of our freedom, he said.

The pope named two further obstacles: acedia, which he defined as a tiredness that “takes away our desire to strive forward” and makes us lukewarm, and clericalism, which he described as a disease that takes away the freedom of the faithful. 

He identified worldliness as the final obstacle to approaching Jesus. 

“We can think of how some sacraments are celebrated in some parishes: how much worldliness there is there,” he said. 

“These are some of the things that stop us from becoming members of Jesus’s flock. We are ‘sheep’ of all these things -- wealth, apathy, rigidity, worldliness, clericalism, ideologies. But freedom is lacking and we cannot follow Jesus without freedom. ‘At times freedom might go too far, and we might slip and fall.’ Yes, that’s true. But this is slipping before becoming free.”

After Mass, the pope presided at adoration and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, before leading those watching via livestream in an act of spiritual communion.

The congregation then sang the Easter Marian antiphon "Regina caeli."

At the end of his homily, the pope prayed: “May the Lord enlighten us to see within ourselves if we have the freedom required to go through the door which is Jesus, to go beyond it with Jesus in order to become sheep of His flock.”

Vatican City, May 5, 2020 / 08:10 am (CNA).- The Vatican’s migrant and refugee office has released a booklet with guidance on how the Church might respond to the problem of people internally displaced within their own countries due to conflict or disaster.

Many people might be unaware of the existence of internally displaced people, or IDPs, Cardinal Michael Czerny, under-secretary of the migrants and refugees section, said May 5.

Speaking during a livestreamed press conference, he noted that internal displacement “is a current, contemporary reality in a surprising number of countries.”

Internally displaced persons are defined as those who have had to flee their home or residence due to violence, conflict, disaster, or development projects to find refuge in another part of the country. Since IDPs have not crossed international borders, they do not have the legal status of refugee or migrant and do not receive the legal protections those categories can give.

Czerny’s office, which is a part of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Development, published a booklet May 5 called “Pastoral Orientations on Internally Displaced People.”

The document is directed primarily at dioceses, parishes, Catholic NGOs, and other Catholic organizations. It has short paragraphs on key issues related to the welcome, protection, promotion, and integration of IDPs, interspersed with quotes from relevant Church documents and speeches by Pope Francis.

The importance of spiritual care for Catholics who are internally displaced in their countries is one of the topics addressed. Cardinal Czerny said Tuesday he would like to highlight the response an average Catholic parish might give when it “discovers IDPs in its midst and learns how to reach out to them.”

“To me, this is a great sign of hope,” he said.

“When the Holy Father asks us to go to the peripheries, we might think of going to a faraway foreign land where we will do exotic things,” the cardinal said. “But the real peripheries which hurt are the ones that are very near at hand, the ones where people among us are invisible, are set aside, are discarded, are overlooked.”

According to data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), at the end of 2019, 45.7 million people were living internally displaced from their homes worldwide for reasons of conflict. Including other causes of displacement, the number of IDPs is more than 50 million.

The IDMC reported that the countries with the highest numbers of internally displaced people are Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Colombia, though nearly every country in the world has IDPs.

In the United States, the IDMC says there were 916,000 people newly displaced internally due to disaster in 2019. The majority of these new displacements were caused by Hurricane Dorian and the California wildfires.

The Church can do something so that “those among us who have been forced to flee and find themselves among us will receive Christian welcome and the response the Body of Christ wants to give them,” Czerny explained.

He said the aim of “Pastoral Orientations” is for the more than 50 million IDPs “to be recognized and supported, promoted and eventually reintegrated, so that they can play an active, constructive role in their country even if powerful causes, both natural and unjust human causes, have forced them to flee from home and take refuge somewhere.”

“In the post-COVID-19 world that is emerging, their contribution will be very much needed,” the cardinal added.

He explained that publishing the document on internal displacement is “not a lessening on the priority of refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking,” but a matter of “continuing to respond to the full range of people’s needs and vulnerabilities,” even in the midst of a global pandemic.

“There are very many needs which didn’t go away just because we were focused on other things in the past weeks,” he underlined. “It’s not a question of COVID-19 displacing priorities. It’s a question of both/and…”

Problems such as internal displacement were already there, “and, on top of it all we also have the challenge as a human family of resisting and overcoming this pandemic.”

The Church, he said, is able “to take on a new challenge without jettisoning other problems as if they suddenly became irrelevant.”

Vatican City, May 5, 2020 / 11:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said that he has looked up to St. John Paul II throughout his priesthood in a book foreword he wrote ahead of the 100-year anniversary of the Polish pope’s birth. 

“St. John Paul II was a great witness of faith … Many times, in the course of my life as a priest and bishop I have looked to him, asking in my prayers for the gift of being faithful to the Gospel as he witnessed to us,” Pope Francis wrote in the forward of a recently published Italian book.

The book, “St. John Paul II: 100 Years. Words and images”, is being issued by the Vatican Publishing House to mark the centenary of Karol Wojtyła’s birth on May 18, 1920.

In his five-page foreword, Pope Francis wrote that St. John Paul II was “a great man of prayer who lived completely immersed in his time and constantly in contact with God, a sure guide for the Church in times of great change.”

“He was a great witness of mercy and throughout his pontificate he called us to this characteristic of God,” Francis said.

When Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II in 1978, a 41-year-old Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was serving as the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina. 

Pope John Paul II appointed Bergoglio an auxiliary bishop in 1992, elevating him to become Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, and creating him a cardinal in 2001. Pope Francis canonized St. John Paul II in 2014.

“Fifteen years now separate us from his death,” Pope Francis said.

The pope pointed out that there are children and young people today who have not known or only have a vague memory of St. John Paul II.

“For this reason, on the centenary of his birth, it was right to remember this great holy witness of the faith that God has given to his Church and to humanity,” he said.

“I hope that this text will reach the hands of many, above all young people. Let us remember his faith. He is an example for us to live our witness today,” the pope said.

Pope Francis wrote that many may not realize how much St. John Paul II suffered in his life. He experienced the death of his mother, brother, and father by the age of 21, and then lived through World War II.

“The suffering that he experienced relying totally on the Lord forged him, and made even stronger the Christian faith in which he had been educated,” Francis said.

“St. John Paul suffered as pope. He suffered a terrible attack in 1981, offered his life, shed his blood for the Church. He testified that even in the difficult trial of disease, shared daily with God made man and crucified for our salvation, we can remain happy. We can remain ourselves,” he continued. 

Pope Francis also commented on John Paul II’s “great passion for the human person” and his openness to dialogue. 

Earlier this year, Pope Francis co-authored a book of reflections on the life of St. John Paul II entitled “St. John Paul the Great.” In this book, Pope Francis said he learned the importance of joy and mercy from the Polish pope.

“It is enough to look at his life” to see that John Paul II had “the smell of the sheep,” Francis said. “He was a pastor who loved people and the people returned it with an immense love.”

Vatican City, May 6, 2020 / 05:30 am (CNA).- The coronavirus crisis can be an opportunity to recenter work on the dignity of each person, Pope Francis said in an appeal at the end of his general audience broadcast on Wednesday. 

“On May 1, I received several messages about the world of work and its problems. I was particularly struck by that of the agricultural workers, among them many migrants, who work in the Italian countryside. Unfortunately, many are very harshly exploited,” Pope Francis said May 6.

“It is true that the current crisis affects everyone, but people's dignity must always be respected. That is why I add my voice to the appeal of these workers and of all exploited workers. May the crisis give us the opportunity to make the dignity of the person and of work the center of our concern,” he said. 

Amid fears of a food shortage, the Italian government is currently discussing whether to legalize some undocumented migrant workers. These workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation with illegal contracts that can pay less than half of Italy’s minimum wage for the agricultural sector.

May 1 is recognized as Labor Day in Italy and many countries throughout Europe, however it is not an official holiday in the Vatican, which instead celebrates the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, established by Pope Pius XII in 1955.

On the feast day, the pope asked St. Joseph to help Catholics fight for dignified work. He prayed that “no one might be without work and all might be paid a just wage.”

Pope Francis said in his Wednesday audience that prayer is “a cry that comes for the heart of those who believe and entrust themselves to God.” The pope began a new cycle of weekly catechesis on May 6 focused on prayer. 

“Not only do Christians pray, they share the cry of prayer with all men and women. But the horizon can still be widened. Paul says that the whole creation ‘groans and suffers the pains of childbirth,’” he said, quoting St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.

“The Catechism states that ‘humility is the foundation of prayer,’” the pope said. “Prayer … comes from our precarious state, from our continuous thirst for God.”

Pope Francis focused his catechesis on the Gospel account of Bartimaeus, the blind beggar from Jericho.

Bartimaeus “uses the only weapon in his possession: his voice. He starts shouting: ‘Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me,’” the pope explained.

“And Jesus listens to his cry. Bartimaeus' prayer touches his heart, the heart of God, and the doors of salvation are opened for him,” he said. “He recognizes in that poor, helpless, despised man, all the power of his faith, which attracts the mercy and power of God.”

“Stronger than any argument, there is a voice in the human heart that calls out. We all have this voice inside. A voice that comes out spontaneously, without anyone commanding it, a voice that questions the meaning of our journey down here, especially when we are in the dark: ‘Jesus, have mercy on me! Jesus, have mercy on me!’ This is a beautiful prayer,” Pope Francis said.