Pope Francis says his Argentinian friends may be among Hamas attack victims

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Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Jul 6, 2021 / 19:01 pm (CNA).
The Archbishop of Santa Cruz de la Sierra said in his homily on Sunday that the high rate of domestic violence and the murder of women in Bolivia must be addressed with pu… […]

Buenaventura, Colombia, Jul 11, 2019 / 04:18 pm (CNA).- Bishop Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya of Buenaventura will perform blessings throughout his cathedral city Saturday, hoping to counter it’s extreme violence, including kidnappings and murders.

Buenaventura is Colombia’s main port on the Pacific, and so is a key point in the international drug trade.

In recent years, Human Rights Watch has said the city’s neighborhoods are controlled by “paramilitary successor groups” which engage in extortion and violence.

Bishop Jaramillo had originally shared the idea of performing a blessing on the city from a helicopter. The news has been erroneously reported by some media as an exorcism.

The Bishop of Buenaventura told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language sister agency, July 10 that the blessing will be done July 13, but not from a helicopter.

“We are going to form a line of vehicles with a firetruck and a statue of Saint Bonaventure. We’re going to go to all locations, to the most difficult neighborhoods where people have been killed in recent years,” he explained.

The caravan and the people who will be waiting throughout the city “will form a people who are going to reinterpret those places of death so they will now be places of life,” Jaramillo said.

At every place the caravan stops, the bishop will offer a prayer, there will be a hymn, and the community will gather together to hear a testimony. “We’re going to pray for the victims and to then do a blessing,” he said.

“Where blood flowed, where blood was shed, we are now going to pour holy water as a sign of reparation at the place where those who died were struck down by violence,” the bishop stated.

Last month, the prelate told Agenzia Fides, “we’ve had 54 violent deaths so far this year, but there are a lot of people who have disappeared. And people don’t report it. The problem is there is still not a culture of reporting because there is fear, we have a society that is afraid to report.”

The bishop also denounced the existence of so-called “torture chambers” or “chop-up houses” where people who were kidnapped are tortured and killed because they got in the way of or did not support gangs and organized crime, something thought to have disappeared in 2015.

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Mexico City, Mexico, Mar 22, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Some 30,000 people gathered last Sunday for the 17th March for Life, Peace and Migrants in Tijuana, Mexico.

Led by the Archbishop of Tijuana, Francisco Moreno Barrón, participants marched from the former bullfighting stadium, Toreo de Tijuana, to the Tijuana Auditorium, where they arrived at 11:30 am.

Before the march on March 19, the Archbishop of Tijuana prayed for the migrants and young people depicted on the wall at Aeropuerto y Cuauhtémoc Norte Boulevard. “We want to make present on this wall all our brother migrants, not just those who cross this border, but all the migrants from all over the world,” the prelate said.

“The entire human community is one family, which came forth from the hands of God out of love. And we are called to live united in love as one family,” he added.

The archbishop said that “unfortunately because of selfishness in the world, the selfishness in the human heart, walls have been raised up, not just in past times, but also in the present, which seek to divide us, alienate us and also at times to confront us.”

Instead of walls, he said, what is needed are “spaces, elements, bridges which would rather bring us closer together and help us build fraternity, so that we can live in peace and realize in our midst God’s dream for his children: that they live united and in peace.”

The State Government Religious Affairs officer, Marco Antonio González, representing the Government Undersecretary, said that “the importance of this march for us is the fact that the Catholic Church is proclaiming, supporting the need we have as a community to promote values and principles.”

The march started around 9:00 am and began with adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. During the march, Archbishop Moreno carried a cross as a symbol of the crosses that migrants carry.

“I invite you to remain united as a Church, making our contribution to building a better society in the Archdiocese of Tijuana, I invite you to be builders of peace, to fight for life and to have an open heart to our migrant brothers,” the prelate exhorted.

After the march, the archbishop celebrated a Mass in the Tijuana Auditorium.

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