Categories
- Evangelization
- School of Prayer
- Worship
- Healing and Revealing
- Catholic Renewal
- Spiritual Warfare
- Apologetics
- Obstacles on the way to God
- Reading the Bible
- Sense of life
- Covenant with God
- Community
- Catholic Church
- Business and Christianity
- Family
- Witnesses of Faith
- Danger: Occultism
- Attention! Sects
Vatican urges generous contributions to Holy Land collection
09-03-2010
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- As Catholics remember the death of Jesus on Good Friday, they also are asked to remember the Christians who still live in the land where Jesus lived and rose from the dead. In a letter to the world's bishops, urging them to support the annual collection for the Holy Land, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri said all Catholics share the responsibility of the Christians in the Holy Land to keep the church alive there and preserve the sites associated with Jesus' life, death and resurrection.
Cardinal Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, coordinates the Holy Land collection, which most parishes take up on Good Friday. His office also coordinates the committee that distributes the funds.
Father Leon Lemmens, an official at the congregation, said that in the past few years, the collection has averaged about $25 million a year.
Along with Cardinal Sandri's appeal, the Vatican published a report March 8 on the projects funded in 2008-2009 in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan. Many of the projects combine archeological studies and restoration of Christian shrines with the improvement of pilgrim facilities and convents at the same site, for example at the Shrine of the Visitation in Ain Karem and the Convent of St. Lazarus in Bethany.
Similar, but more extensive work is going on in Magdala, the presumed home of Mary Magdalene, which will include a pilgrim itinerary designed to illustrate daily life in the town at the time of Jesus.
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/briefs/cns/20100308.htm
