Last Sunday night, here in Italy, a great number of Catholic churches, from cities to the smallest villages, rung their bells at 10pm — an unusual time —to signify solidarity with the Palestinians who are being killed by an engineered famine. As a friend put it, “At least we feel we are a portion of a hurting whole.”

People may stop caring for the world when they feel that their caring goes nowhere. The good news is that the mounting of international pressure on the Israeli government has obtained some results, such as the allowing of humanitarian aid into Gaza. But what happens when our actions are not met with success and remain — as some would say — “merely symbolic”?

by Gianluigi Bugliermetto

Dear brother Leo, welcome!

You are one of us, a man in flesh and blood so you are entitled to a warm welcome. Just as on the day your mother gave you to the world, and today again because of the task to you entrusted. It must be indeed like a second or third birth to you.

Taking a new name is not a light choice to make and a person can only do that a few times in life. Most of us don’t even do it, although we hope you know that some do, for very good reasons, when entering a completely new life. Nuns do it (not all), monks do it (not all), transgender people do it (not all). Today, you are in deep communion with them all.

Friends,

My Dominican family in Ukraine continues to be a supportive and courageous presence to the Ukrainian people. Their latest letter to us quotes from the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of the Second Vatican Council: “Peace is not merely the absence of war; nor can it be reduced solely to the maintenance of a balance of power between enemies; nor is it brought about by dictatorship. Instead, it is rightly and appropriately called an enterprise of justice”

— Joseph Kilikevice, OP