London, England, Dec 21, 2014 / 01:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- This Advent, young Catholics in the UK are using video media to challenge their peers to “engage in the life and rhythm of the Church” and seek a deeper relationship with Christ. Made for Glory, a by-the-youth, for-the-youth faith initiative in the UK, has been releasing a video for every day of Advent. Each video features a reflection from one of several young people based upon that day’s Gospel reading. So far, they've produced 25 videos for their virtual Advent calendar.  “We’re all thirsting for more of the truth!” said John Withers, team member of Made for Glory, the group spearheading the project. “Advent is packed full of themes that speak right to the hearts of young people: longing, expectance, repentance, joy,” he told CNA in a Dec. 19 e-mail interview.   “What we’re doing with Made for Glory is nothing revolutionary,” Made for Glory team member Patrick Morton told CNA. “We’re simply trying to help people move from that initial encounter with Christ, into a deeper personal relationship with him.” The aim of this year’s Advent reflections, Morton explained, is to help “young people engage more with the life and rhythm of the Church by taking Christ's message in the daily Gospels and bringing it into our everyday life, helping us to live the Gospel more actively in the build up to Christmas.” “At the heart of Advent is the anticipation of Christmas itself… a call to take our faith seriously,” Morton said. “It’s a call to struggle, and work hard, and strive towards holiness; towards Christ. That’s why, in each video, we worked in this practical, apostolic element.” Withers added that repentance seems to be an Advent theme that resonates strongly with many young people.  “The message of John the Baptist, which we hear again and again, is repent and believe,” he said. “I have always enjoyed reading about the struggles of the saints because it fills me with such hope; God can transform our lives.” Many young people in the UK cite Pope Benedict XVI’s 2010 visit to the country as a significant moment in their faith, Withers said. The visit “fanned a flame from the spark of faith we had been given.” Withers himself was present when the now Emeritus Pope addressed 3,000 young Catholics outside Westminster Cathedral in London. A young Catholic from a fairly small parish, Withers remembers being "blown away by the sudden reality of the universality of the Catholic Church.”  Pope Francis, too, is fanning the flame of faith that Benedict started, Morton said.  “If Pope Benedict built bridges for Catholics in Britain, then we can firmly say that Pope Francis has single handedly managed to make being Catholic cool.”  “He’s an out-and-out evangelist, who builds bridges for Christ on foundations of friendship and trust,” he said. “He’s encouraging young Catholics to step up and be counted, to not be afraid, because when we say yes to Christ the joy of the Christian life overwhelms any doubts or fears.”  Morton added that many young people are done with what the world offers them and are seeking real answers to their deepest questions. “I think that as society becomes more secular, more relativised, more seemingly absent of definitive truth, then the more passionately young people will seek the truth,” Morton continued. “Young people aren’t satisfied with the soft answer, they want the real thing, they want the truth, however challenging it may be.” In addition to being contributors to this project, Morton and Withers are also part of the team at the Vocations Centre for the Archdiocese of Southwark in London. The entire Advent video calendar can be viewed on the Made for Glory Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnpuOKqS61B7VcTe9C-BTqw Read more

Rome, Italy, Dec 21, 2014 / 04:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A new initiative out of Ireland is using Biblical dioramas to engage parents and children in Scripture. The Jesse Box, says one of its creators Sebastian Kraszkiewicz, aims “to help pass the faith to the children and to encourage family liturgy.” The diorama kit provides tools for children who, with the help of their parents, can create and act out different stories from the Old and New Testament. The biblical stories currently available include the Creation account, Exodus, the Christmas story, and Pentecost. The set is accompanied by study manuals and activity books to help guide the children through each story. The Jesse Box, co-creator said Paul Barnes in an interview with CNA, has the potential for engaging the entire family – parents and children alike – to learn more about the faith. It is designed in such a way that, by helping the children assemble the dioramas and guiding them through the stories with the provided study guides, parents also engage with the Scripture stories. “The family gets together, reads some Scripture and then make that story using the components that you find in the story manual for that story,” Barnes said. “And the basic components are the backgrounds you put in three background scenes, you make the characters and you make the props for that story and as you are doing that, of course, you are talking about the story.” “Even though this is for children, it is really for the whole family,” he said. Barnes, along with fellow Jesse Box creators Gerry Malone and Sebastian Kraszkiewicz – who is married to Malone's daughter – where recently in Rome to bring this initiative to Bishop Jean Laffitte secretary for Pontifical Council to the Family. Speaking of their meeting with Bishop Laffitte, Gerry Malone told CNA that the prelate expressed “the need of initiatives like the Jesse Box box to help our children and families grow discovering the love of  God in the Scripture. Because the family faces extraordinary challenges in today’s society.” The name for the Jesse Box was inspired in part by Isaiah 11:1: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Since medieval times, the Tree of Jesse has often been depicted during Advent, offering a visual representation of Christ's genealogy. In a similar way, Malone said, the makers of the Jesse Box not only wanted to provide a tool for discovering the genealogy of Christ, but for all “salvation history.” Ignatius Press is the distributor for the Jesse Box in the United States. Julie Johnson, a consultant for the publishing house, told CNA that the initiative is a unique catechetical tool because it helps “students become an active part of God’s love story…where it becomes their story.” “Students not only learn about events and characters throughout the Bible, they come to know who these characters are and learn how to relate to similar faith journeys. Through the Jesse Box, the Word becomes flesh, it comes alive for students.” “The family is the nucleus of society and it is critical that it is whole in order to restore the culture,” she continued, and the Jesse Box does just that. “Older siblings can guide younger siblings, family members can learn together or learn from one another.” “The Jesse Box is not a mere toy, but rather a tool that while simple to use, also probes into the meaning of our faith on all levels... Our faith should bring families together and the Jesse Box should be the catalyst to accomplish this goal.” This is the core idea behind the Jesse Box, said Kraszkiewicz: “to help pass the faith to the children and to encourage family liturgy.” Because it is difficult to keep the attention of young children for long periods of time, he said, the Jesse Box helps to get them involved in the Bible stories: “they cut out, create their own characters,” and therefore feel as though they are taking part in the story. “If you are creating something then you take a little bit ownership of so you feel that story becomes yours.” Moreover, by engaging with the Scripture stories in a tangible way, Kraszkiewicz continued, children can relate the various stories to their own lives, especially if they are  experiencing difficulties. “It is a help for parents to equip their children for the future,” Kraszkiewicz said, noting how it is becoming increasingly difficult for children “to receive Christian values” in today's society. Kraszkiewicz said, “the most important job of a parent is to pass the faith to the children.” Read more

Rome, Italy, Dec 19, 2014 / 03:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- “To communicate is to unify” is the first of the “Ten Words of Communication” that Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, described in a lecture given Nov. 24 at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome. Fr. Federico Lombardi was given an 'honoris causa' degree in social communication from the university, and in the lecture he held at ceremony he traced with passion the 25 years he has spent working in the Church’s communications, summing up all the teaching he had learned in Ten Commandments, which he called ‘Ten Messages.” “There are people who think that conflict must be fed in order to make communication more dynamic. Let me stress that I am radically against this view; I hate and refuse this kind of communication. And this truly comes from my heart,” Fr. Lombardi said. The first message is “communicating to unify,” and it is built on the background of the personal experience of Fr. Lombardi, who was appointed director of Vatican Radio in 1991, “on the day when the first bombs of the First Gulf War were lobbed.” Fr. Lombardi confessed he was unaware of what to do, but that he soon learned that his job “was not so difficult,” since Vatican Radio is the “Pope’s Radio … and the Pope was not silent about what was going on in the world.” Commitment to peace is crucial for the communication of Vatican Radio, according to Fr. Lombardi. “Peace. Talking about peace. Continually and insistently. How many times during these years the Popes have patiently and constantly guided us in speaking of peace!” Fr. Lombardi’s second message is “to understand and preserve the value of the variety of cultures.” He recounted how after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a proposal to close the Eastern Languages section of Vatican Radio, since the Eastern Churches no longer needed such great support. He was totally against the idea, he said, since “communication for the Church and for persons must accompany their life and historical situation, interpret their expectations and needs. If you really love people, you continue walking with them.” This message is linked to the third, which “deals with focusing on minorities and on poor regions, which lack technical and economic possibilities.” His Fourth Word regards transparency: “If your conscience is clear and you are objectively looking for truth, you can endure any situation.” Fr. Lombardi’s Fifth Message is that “serving the Church and a beloved Pope can provide the needed motivation to achieve together – I insist, together, as a community – great enterprises, even in communication.” He reflected on his experience covering the last year of St. John Paul II's life, and the subsequent conclave of 2005. The positive outcomes of the coverage let him understand that “if well prepared and motivated, everyone can produce great things,” considering that “we are talking about people, not about numbers, (but) about human resources.” This communication enterprise included filming and covering the last acts of St. John Paul II in his sickness, and his suffering. “I am absolutely convinced that it would not have been possible to cover with a camera and transmit to the world the image of the suffering Pope, with truth, discretion and respect, all at once, if the camera and the transmission had not been directed by a profound love for the person filmed,” Fr. Lombardi stressed. And he concluded that “to understand and fully communicate the deepest message of one person, we should love him, love him very much” – this is the Sixth Message. Fr. Lombardi then spoke about his experience as director of the Holy See press office, and of how much his work had been tried, especially in the cases of the clergy sex abuse scandal and of Vatican finances. On the side of sex abuse scandal, Fr. Lombardi reminded that “Benedict XVI had spoken several times about the path of purification of the Church regarding these horrible signs of the presence of evil within herself.” “Being on the frontline as a communicator permits and requires one to be involved in a very deep way in this path, and to take part in it trying to pay with your own personal suffering a little contribution to the huge price the Church has to pay off it,” Fr. Lombardi confessed. And he stressed that the Seventh Message is “being ready, in solidarity with the community of the Church, to pay the often painful price of growing up in truth.” On the finances side, Fr. Lombardi recounted how the communication strategy developed, also thanks to an external communication firm specialized in that kind of communication, because “it is right to observe that the press office, with the current resources, is not able to manage by itself the communication of technically complex issues and needs to continually integrate its service.” Fr. Lombardi takes from the financial issue the Eight Message: “We must consider normal being able to honestly account of the administrative and juridical issues of our institutions. This is part of the Church’s credibility.” The ninth message, then,  is that of “living and securing the specific nature of being a pilgrim Church, and reporting about it so that this may be shared, not denaturalized,” since “the mission of the Church, and communication, are strictly linked because of their nature.” “This is what I am intensely living during this Pontificate, that was able to put into question many aspects of our life and of our work. This is my Tenth and Last Message.” Read more