EWTN launches Arabic-language news agency based in Iraq

CNA Staff   By CNA Staff

March 25, 2022 Catholic News Agency News Briefs 0 Print

 

The logo of ACI MENA, EWTN’s new Arabic-language news agency, based in Erbil, Iraq. / EWTN

Irondale, Ala., Mar 25, 2022 / 07:28 am (CNA).

EWTN Global Catholic Network has launched an Arabic-language news service headquartered in Erbil, Iraq, Michael P. Warsaw, EWTN’s chairman and CEO, announced March 25, on the Solemnity of the Annunciation.

The Association for Catholic Information Middle East and North Africa, or ACI MENA, will publish original news content in Arabic using a network of correspondents across the region. The news agency will operate from the campus of Erbil’s Catholic University (CUE.) A ceremony marking the occasion was held in Erbil, which included Archbishop Bashar Warda of the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil.

“I am pleased to announce that EWTN has begun a service reporting news from the embattled and underserved Christian communities in the Middle East,” Warsaw said.

“This is an important milestone in the growth of EWTN News around the globe, and I am pleased that we are taking this significant step to better serve our courageous brothers and sisters in the region who have endured so much,” he said.

“Because it is published in Arabic, this agency will also augment the service offered by ACI-Africa, our Nairobi, Kenya-based Catholic news agency, which EWTN launched in 2019 and which publishes content in English, French and Portuguese,” Warsaw added. “ACI MENA will provide a new voice to help spread the Gospel and news of the Church to these Christian communities in their own language.”

Bashar Jameel Hanna, a Chaldean Catholic layman originally from Baghdad, will head EWTN's newly launched Arabic-language news service, ACI-MENA. The service will provide a new voice to help spread the Gospel and news of the Church to Christian communities in the Middle East and North Africa. EWTN
Bashar Jameel Hanna, a Chaldean Catholic layman originally from Baghdad, will head EWTN’s newly launched Arabic-language news service, ACI-MENA. The service will provide a new voice to help spread the Gospel and news of the Church to Christian communities in the Middle East and North Africa. EWTN

Hanna studied philosophy and theology for nine years at the Babel College in Iraq and graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the University of Nantes in France. Hanna speaks Arabic, French, English, and Aramaic fluently, and has a significant understanding of classic Arabic.

“When war came around to Iraq, I lost friends and relatives and became a political refugee in Europe,” Hanna said. “Ten years later, I received a call to work on the reconstruction in the Nineveh plains, to rebuild the church of Mosul. Then, late last year, I received a call for the position of Editor-in-Chief with ACI MENA. And I heard the Lord say: ‘I took you from the ends of the earth; from its farthest corners I called you. I said, you are my servant; I have chosen you and have not rejected you’ (Isaiah 41:9.)”

“Becoming ACI MENA’s Editor-in-Chief, to carry the message of love to the Arabic world still submerged in conflicts and persecution, may be a heavy cross … but He has risen!” Hanna added.

Alejandro Bermudez, executive director of the ACI Group, of which ACI MENA is now a part, called the news agency’s launch “a major step forward for the ACI Group as well as for the larger EWTN News family.”

“We are honored to expand our news coverage of the ancient and heroic communities in this region, providing them local, Vatican and world news in Arabic,” Bermudez said. “ACI MENA will not be a simple translation of news in Arabic, but a local news agency written in Arabic for the Arabic-speaking world, which will also bring stories of local Christian communities to the rest of the world.”

ACI MENA is the latest addition to the ACI Group, which includes ACI Prensa, the world’s largest Spanish-language Catholic news organization with headquarters in Lima, Peru; ACI Digital, the São Paulo, Brazil-based news organization, which serves the Portuguese-speaking world; ACI Stampa, the Italian-language news organization based in Rome; and ACI Africa, which covers news from the African continent in English, French, and Portuguese.

ACI Group is part of the larger EWTN News, Inc. division, which also includes Catholic News Agency (CNA), the German-language news service CNA Deutsch, and several other Catholic news outlets, including the National Catholic Register, “EWTN News Nightly,” “EWTN News In Depth,” and several other television news programs.

In its 41st year, EWTN is the largest religious media network in the world. EWTN’s 11 global TV channels are broadcast in multiple languages 24 hours a day, seven days a week to over 390 million television households in more than 150 countries and territories.

EWTN platforms also include radio services transmitted through SIRIUS/XM, iHeart Radio, and over 500 domestic and international AM and FM radio affiliates; a worldwide shortwave radio service; one of the largest Catholic websites in the U.S.; and EWTN News; as well as EWTN Publishing, its book publishing division.

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Cardinal O’Malley: ‘Padre Pio shows us the power of the cross’

September 23, 2022 Catholic News Agency 2
Cardinal Seán O’Malley celebrates Mass in San Giovanni Rotondo for the feast of Padre Pio Sept. 23, 2022 / Screenshot of Youtube livestream from Padre Pio TV.

Rome Newsroom, Sep 23, 2022 / 04:20 am (CNA).

Padre Pio shows the world the power of bearing physical suffering with patience and love, Cardinal Seán O’Malley said at Mass for the Italian saint’s feast day on Friday.

O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, celebrated Mass on Sept. 23 in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, in the Church of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina.

“Padre Pio carried the burden of the stigmata for five decades, this and so many other physical sufferings were borne with love and patience. In a world where pain is seen as the greatest evil, Padre Pio shows us the power of the cross,” O’Malley said.

“He shows us that the greatest evil is not pain, but sin and selfishness,” the cardinal continued. “Pain can be a two-edged sword that turns us in on ourselves, leads to self-pity, anger or despair. When the cross is born with love and in union with Jesus it is life-giving and leads to resurrection.”

O’Malley, 78, has been a member of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin since 1965. Padre Pio, one of the 20th century’s most beloved saints, was also a Capuchin friar.

Pio, born Francesco Forgione in 1887, made solemn vows with the Capuchins at the age of 19. His life was marked by illness and physical suffering, including receiving the visible stigmata — bleeding wounds corresponding to the five wounds Christ received at his crucifixion — in 1918.

A statue of Padre Pio in the Church of Saint Pio of Pietrelicina in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. Screenshot from Youtube livestream by Padre Pio TV.
A statue of Padre Pio in the Church of Saint Pio of Pietrelicina in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. Screenshot from Youtube livestream by Padre Pio TV.

His desire to create a hospital founded on the principle of caring for both the body and soul of the sick and suffering also led him to establish Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, or Home for the Relief of the Suffering, today a state-of-the-art private hospital and research center.

Padre Pio’s mission, Cardinal O’Malley said, “was a mission of mercy, to those who were sick physically or spiritually and, in that context, he announced the good news of the gospel.”

“The confessional and the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza are just two of the ways Padre Pio manifested the loving mercy of God in the world convulsed by pain and suffering and sin,” he noted.

The cardinal quoted a line from the book “Padre Pio: The True Story.” The author, Bernard Ruffin, wrote that “Padre Pio made God real.”

“In a world of unbelief, the presence of holiness brings light and peace into a world of darkness and chaos,” O’Malley said in his homily. “The Saints next door, and the saints that God magnifies with his graces are a gift to increase in us a nostalgia for homeland yet unseen, for which we were created.”

Cardinal Seán O'Mally celebrates Mass for the feast of Padre Pio Sept. 23, 2022 in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. Screenshot from Youtube livestream by Padre Pio TV.
Cardinal Seán O’Mally celebrates Mass for the feast of Padre Pio Sept. 23, 2022 in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. Screenshot from Youtube livestream by Padre Pio TV.

He recalled when Pope Francis said that the two paths to holiness are prayer and community.

“Padre Pio,” he said, “is an outstanding example of this in a society that has largely abandoned prayer and the Sabbath observance, but this holy man teaches us that prayer brings the power of the cross into our lives and allows us to enter into the mystery of the Eucharist.”

Many people no longer attend Mass on Sundays because they do not know how to pray, Cardinal O’Malley said: “Today we stand in this holy place to ask Padre Pio to pray for us and teach us how to pray, to love and to heal.”

“May he lend us that ladder that will allow us to climb the cross and lovingly pull out the nails from the hands of our brothers and sisters who are, as Mother Teresa used to say: ‘Christ in a distressing disguise.’”

“Today we stand before this great saint and say thank you for showing the world that God is real and that the only real success in life is holiness,” he said.

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