The Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the heart of the Vatican Gardens that was the “home” of the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, for almost ten years, is to resume its original purpose.
Pope Francis has asked that it once again serve as the residence for contemplative orders “to support the Holy Father in his daily care for the whole Church, through the ministry of prayer, adoration, praise, and reparation: a praying presence in silence and solitude.”
A statement released by the Holy See Press Office on Mon-day, 13 November, said Pope Francis announced this decision in a handwritten letter dated 1 October of this year.
The Pope has summoned the Nuns of the Benedictine Order of the Abbey of Saint Scolastica in Victoria, Buenos Aires province (Diocese of San Isidro) in Argentina, “who have generously accepted the invitation” of the Pontiff, the statement said. In his brief “The Contemplative Life” of 25 March 1994, St.John Paul II canonically established a monastery of contemplative nuns in Vatican City, with the title of Mater Ecclesiae.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had expressed the desire to reside there after his historic resignation on 11th February 2013. He spent the last years of his life there, assisted by his collaborators and accompanying the Church in prayer until his death on 31st December 2022.The monastery, the statement continued, will now welcome six nuns who, according to the statutes, will form the Mo-nastic Community and will begin living in the monastery in early January.

Following a temporary cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, the U.S. bishops’ inter-national humanitarian aid agency is ramping up its humanitarian assistance to Gaza with the hope that the ceasefire agreement will last indefinitely.
Bill O’Keefe, Catholic Relief Services executive vice president for mission and mobilization, told Crux that the organization is assembling trucks of supplies in Egypt. Meanwhile, CRS staff in Gaza are preparing to receive the trucks and planning how to distribute those resources safely.
The news comes after Israel and Hamas agreed to a four-day ceasefire in the war in Gaza on November 22. In the deal, 50 Israeli hostages captured by Ha-mas during its Oct. 7 terrorist attack will be released, including women and children, in exchange for what Hamas said would be about 150 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would resume the war after the truce and continue its fight to destroy Hamas and release the remaining hostages. However, Israel also said that the truce would be extended an extra day for every 10 hostages freed by Hamas. The ceasefire goes into effect Nov. 23. The deal was brokered by Qatar, the U.S., and Egypt.
O’Keefe added that CRS continues to pray for the release of hostages, and for the safety of civilians in harm’s way.
O’Keefe applauded the deal, as CRS has long called for a cessation of violence.
“That level of activity is good news, and we are actively and urgently ramping up our humanitarian assistance to take advantage of this pause however long it lasts,” O’Keefe said. “I hope it will last indefinitely, but we are taking advantage of it to meet as many needs of vulnerable Palestinians as we possibly can.”

If you go to daily Mass, you know it’s pretty unusual to run across much of a crowd.
If you go to Mass at your local parish, there may be only a handful of people there, many of them retired, with maybe a few homeschool families to round things out.
If you go to Mass at a New-man Centre, or a downtown ca-thedral during the lunch hour, things are a bit different–at those places, there might well be a few hundred people at a daily Mass.
A congregation of more than 1,000 would take most Ameri-cans by surprise at a weekday Mass, especially at a parish with four or five Masses every day of the week – and sometimes several more. But a recent visitor to St. Mary’s parish church in Dubai found exactly that.
St.Mary’s Catholic Parish is one of the largest parishes in the world, and a center of life for the Catholics who come to live and work in an Arabian city whose population has tripled in the last 20 years – mostly because of the migrants and their children who make up 85% of Dubai’s popu-lation.
Founded in 1967, and staffed by Capuchins, mostly from an Indian province, St.Mary’s is one of two Catholic churches in the emirate of Dubai – the parish is responsible for at least 300,000 parishioners, though some esti-mates are much larger.
The parish is a lifeline to Catholic migrants living in Dubai – many of whom live there in adverse and gravely difficult situations.
Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, is a hard place to understand. Just 60 years ago, the city could hardly be said to exist — it was a coastal outpost on the Arabian Peninsula with a population under 50,000.
But oil, struck in Dubai in 1966, changed everything. The Emirati citizens of Dubai became fabulously rich, and there was money to be made in Dubai for anyone who could balance a ledger, lay a row of bricks, or clean a toilet.
Infrastructure sprang up, and independent monarchies along the Persian Gulf formed the United Arab Emirates — a political union of convenience, which allows for seven small states to maintain their monarchical sovereignty, while banding together to make easier doing business with the rest of the world.
Dubai is a place unlike any other — it is something of the wild west, something of a booming oil town, something of an absolute Islamic monarchy, and something of an increasingly cosmopolitan global city. It is home to both the world’s tallest building, and to some of the world’s most abject poverty.

Right-wing populist Javier Milei said on November 19 that Argentina’s situation is “critical” and he promised to make “drastic” changes once he takes over the presidency of the third-largest economy in Latin America.
“Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures,” Milei told supporters who chanted “president, president” and “liberty, liberty” when the right-wing populist took the stage.
He also said that the “reconstruction of Argentina begins today.”
With 97.6% of votes tallied in Sunday’s presidential runoff vote, Milei had 55.8% and Economy Minister Sergio Massa 44.2%, according to Argentina’s electoral authority. Presuming that margin holds, it would be wider than predicted by all polls and the widest since Argentina’s return of democracy in 1983.
In his first speech as president-elect, Milei also sent a message to the outgoing government, saying the country was their “responsibility until the end of the term” on Dec. 10.
Massa, of the ruling Peronist party, conceded and congratulated Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist who has drawn frequent comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump.
With a Milei victory, the country will swing to the right and empower a freshman lawmaker who got his start as a television talking head blasting what he called the “political caste.” For years, Milei criticized the Church’s social doctrine and insulted Pope Francis on several occasions due to his defense of concepts like social justice. He even called the pope an “imbecile” and defined him as “communist.”

Participants in the synod on synodality endorsed a report on October 28 proposing potentially far-reaching changes to foster a synodal Church. The 42-page “synthesis report” – “A synodal Church in mission” understands Synodality as “the walk of Christians with Christ toward the Kingdom, together with all humanity,” it said. This perhaps can be called deconstruction which is journey from an “I” to a “we”. This is the change Pope Francis brought about in the church. It became “a tool at the service of ongoing discernment” attribution of greater responsibility to the episcopal conferences in this area is urged.
After those processes, 365 voting dele-gates – more than 75% of them bishops – were invited to spend four weeks in October in Rome, discussing the topic of synodality, Vatican’s Paul VI Hall included almost 100 staffers, observers, and subject area experts invited to consult or take in the meeting
The text “widely reported need to make liturgical language more accessible to the faithful and more embodied in the diversity of cultures.” Episcopal conferences should be entrusted with a wider responsibility in this regard. Turning to the 23 autono-mous Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with Rome, the report mentioned a proposal for the creation of a council connecting the heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches with the pope, as well as a “joint commission of Eastern and Latin theologians, historians and canonists” to address complex issues. A revision of the Code of Canon Law and the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches is requested.
“The Holy Father has significantly in-creased the number of women in positions of responsibility in the Roman Curia,” it added. “The same should happen at other levels of the life of the Church. Canon law must be adapted accordingly.”
The text noted that many assembly mem-bers had highlighted the danger of “‘cleri-calizing’ the laity, perpetuates inequalities and divisions among the People of God.” The possibility should be considered of re-inserting priests who have left the ministry in pastoral services.

A German bishop issued a letter on Noevmebr 2 asking pastors in his diocese to bless same-sex couples.
Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiese-mann said in the Nov. 2 letter to priests, deacons, and lay pastoral workers that the blessings – whi-ch he also extended to remarried couples–could take place in chur-ches in the Diocese of Speyer.
“The ceremony must differ from a church wedding ceremony in terms of words and signs and should explicitly reinforce the love, commitment, and mutual responsibility in the couple’s re-lationship as an act of blessing,” he wrote in the 1,000-word letter.
Local Catholic media said that Wiesemann was the first German bishop to make such an appeal, though other prelates have stre-ssed previously that pastors will face no sanctions for blessing same-sex and remarried couples in their dioceses.
Wiesemann, who has led the diocese in southwest Germany since 2008, said he was issuing the invitation after 93% of parti-cipants in the country’s contro-versial “synodal way” endorsed a document calling for “blessing ceremonies for couples who love each other.”
The text called for the crea-tion of a “handout” for use in German dioceses that included “suggested forms for blessing celebrations for various couple situations (remarried couples, same-sex couples, couples after civil marriage).”

Pope Francis is continuing his efforts for peace in the Holy Land. As confirmed by the Holy See, on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 5, the Holy Father had a conversation with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi.
The Vatican has limited itself to confirming that the call took place at the request of Raisi, who, according to a statement from the Iranian president’s office, thanked the Holy Father for his calls for peace and said that it is duty of followers of all Abraha-mic religions to “support the oppressed people of Palestine.”
Raisi asked the Holy Father to exert his influence in the West to end the attacks in Gaza, which he called “the greatest genocide of the century.”
He also urged Pope Francis to “correctly explain the position of the oppressor and the oppre-ssed” in the conflict.
In his Nov. 5 Angelus, Pope Francis renewed his call for a cease-fire and said he hoped that “avenues will be pursued so that an escalation of the conflict might be absolutely avoided, so that the wounded can be rescued and help might get to the population of Gaza where the humanitarian situation is extremely serious.”
He also called for the imme-diate release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, especially child-ren.
The phone call was in addition to the different conversations the pontiff has had with various lead-ers since Hamas terrorists atta-cked Israel on Oct. 7.

At age 66, Father Peter Adamski became a priest in the town of Stratford, Connecticut, at St. James Church. But his path to the priesthood was not your typical journey.
As a teenager, Adamski believed the Lord was calling him to be a priest. That quickly changed when one day on his college campus, at age 19, he laid eyes on Kathy, the woman who would become his wife of 40 years.
“I go up this set of stairs and I see this vision leaning against the wall,” Adamski told EWTN correspondent Colm Flynn in an interview for “EWTN News In Depth.”
It was love at first sight, Adamski said, and the two married less than two years later.
Adamski joined the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson at the age of 26 and quickly became a successful business-man.
One day, Kathy confronted him in his office: “She said, ‘Peter, you cannot serve both God and mammon and your corporate career is your mammon and you’-re jeopardizing this marriage.’”
Adamski took this as a wake-up call and began to focus more on his marriage. Soon after, he and his wife had a son, John. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for the family of three until they received unexpected news: Kathy was diagnosed with cancer and early-onset Alzhei-mer’s.
“I can still see us embracing on the sidewalk knowing what we were just told – there’s no cure for Alzheimer’s, it’s the long goodbye. And I knew that our vision of us growing old and stooped over and gray hair toge-ther wasn’t going to happen.”

Over the past 100 years, the number of Christians in Türkiye has fallen from 20% to 0.2% of the population. The systematic targeting of Turkish Christians and missionaries from abroad by the Turkish government has significantly contributed to this trend. Human rights experts hi-ghlighted the growing intole-rance against Christians in Türkiye at Europe’s largest human rights conference, which was hosted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Warsaw, Poland on Oct. 5.
As the Islamisation of the country progre-sses, Open Doors reports that the pressure on the Christian community has increased massively since the coup attempt by a faction of the armed forces in 2016. There is arguably a dictatorial paranoia that sees an enemy in all foreign actors, manifesting in anti-Christian sentiment. Conspiracy theories often paint Christians as collaborators with foreign powers seeking to undermine Turkish identity. The govern-ment spends enormous sums of money to spread Islam at home and abroad through one of its largest ministries, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs. Alongside these efforts, it has become increasingly wary of a small number of Christian missionaries residing in the country.

The new analysis of a study that claims to be the largest national survey of Catholic priests conducted in more than 50 years has found, among other thin-gs, that priests describing themselves as “progre-ssive” are practically go-ing “extinct” among U.S. seminary graduates, with the vast majority of young ordinands describing themselves as conservative and orthodox.
Conducted by The Catholic Project, a research group at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., the newest release focuses on polarization, generational dynamics, and the ongoing impact of the sexual abuse crisis.
Part 1 of the survey, released last October, found that despite rela-tively high levels of per-sonal well-being and ful-fillment among priests as a whole, a significant percentage of priests have issues with burnout, dis-trust in their bishop, and fears of being falsely accused of misconduct.
The new November report highlights “several themes which have emerged from closer analysis of the quantitative data, as well as careful study of the qualitative data collected from the one-on-one interviews with priests.” The study used survey responses from 3,516 priests across 191 dioceses and eparchies in the United States.