Each year, the donations receievd during the Masses of the Epiphany are intended for the Persecuted Christians.

This year, we raised £2,138.17. Thank you all for your kind generosity!

Your donations have been sent to Aid to the Church in Need. This year we are supporting their ‘Ethiopia and Eritrea Appeal’ campaign to help our Christian brothers and sister who are suffering there.

We have received this message from the National Director of ACN(UK), Mr. Neville Kyrke-Smith :

“Many thanks to you and all the faithful in the Diocese of Gibraltar for this great kindness in offering vital help to suffering and persecuted Christians. We are very pleased to acknowledge your kind Epiphany collection gift of £ 2,138.17 which has just reached us at Aid to the Church in Need and we are assigning this to help in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The work of ACN has had to increase in Africa in recent years, because of the increased attacks on Christian communities and the challenges faced by the faithful. In our latest special report we focussed on what many Christians in Ethiopia and Eritrea endure. However, as Fr Netsanet Yadeta said, there is a wonderful richness of faith. This is true in all the parts of the world where we work thanks to you. For we can all be encouraged this Lent by the words of St Paul (Romans 5:3-5):

‘We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.'”.

For more information on this project, please click here to visit the ACN website.

Repentance is turning away from sin and back to God. Usually, this includes some form of penance, to express our sorrow and desire to renew our lives (c.f. Jer. 18:11, 25:5; Ez. 18:30, 33:11-15; Joel 2:12; Mt. 3:2; Mt. 4:17; Acts 2:38).

Christ Himself said that His disciples would fast once He had departed (Lk. 5:35). The general law of penance given by the Church, is therefore an expression of the law of God for us.

The Church for her part has specified certain forms of penance, both to ensure that her members will do something, as required by Divine will, while making it easy for them to fulfil their obligation. The 1983 Code of Canon Law specifies the obligations of Latin Rite Catholics [Eastern Rite Catholics have their own penitential practices given in the Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches].

• Canon 919: One who is to receive the Most Holy Eucharist is to abstain from any food or drink, with the exception of water and medicine, for at least the period of one hour before Holy Communion.
• Canon 1250: All Fridays through the year and the time of Lent are penitential days and times throughout the entire Church.
• Canon 1251: Abstinence from eating meat or another food according to the prescriptions of the conference of bishops is to be observed on Fridays throughout the year unless they are solemnities; abstinence and fast are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and on the Friday of the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
• Canon 1252: All persons who have completed their fourteenth year are bound by the law of abstinence; all adults are bound by the law of fast up to the beginning of their sixtieth year. Nevertheless, pastors and parents are to see to it that minors who are not bound by the law of fast and abstinence are educated in an authentic sense of penance.
• Canon 1253: It is for the conference of bishops to determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence and to substitute in whole or in part for fast and abstinence other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety.

Those who are excused from fasting or abstinence

Besides those outside the age limits, those not of good mental health, the sick, the frail, pregnant or nursing women according to need for meat or nourishment, manual labourers according to need, guests at a meal who cannot excuse themselves without giving offense to their host, and other situations of moral or physical impossibility to observe the penitential discipline.

Aside from these minimum penitential requirements, Catholics are encouraged to impose some personal penance on themselves at other times. It could be modelled after abstinence and fasting. A person could, for example, multiply the number of days they abstain. Some people give up meat entirely for religious motives (as opposed to those who give it up for health or other motives). Some religious orders, as a penance, never eat meat. Similarly, one could multiply the number of days that one fasted. The early Church had a practice of a Wednesday and Saturday fast. This fast could be the same as the Church’s law (one main meal and two smaller ones) or stricter, even bread and water. Such freely chosen fasting could also consist in giving up something one enjoys – chocolates, soft drinks, smoking, and so on. This is left to the individual.

Jesus reminds us to: “Be careful not to parade your good deeds before men to attract their notice; by doing this you will lose all reward from your Father in heaven” (c.f. Matthew 6:1-6,16-18). We should therefore never seek our vainglory, but do everything out of genuine love of God and our neighbour.

Have mercy on us, O Lord, for we have sinned

(c.f. Psalm 50(51):3-6,12-14,17)

The Cornerstone Bookshop is pleased to announce that we have received approximately 100 copies of María Vallejo-Nágera’s bestseller “Badlands” from a very generous donor and we, in turn, are giving them away to our customers for a donation, which will be given to one of our local charities.

Badlands:

“What I find so touching is that, for a Split second, my heart connects with that baby and its inconsolable crying. Its lament cuts right through my soul! And then I start sobbing, because I feel that little one belongs to me, that he´s mine and that there´s an eternal cord that connects my insides to him, a cord that I couldn´t sever even if I wanted to…”

“Anne Sophie, this book´s real-life protagonist, was not lucky enough to have been blessed with a happy childhood. Born into a difficult family and a home bereft of love, she was the victim of abuse that began at a very young age and would continue into her adolescence, culminating in an unwanted pregnancy: “a being that was conceived out of human violence but who also died for the exact same reason.”

“Yet life curiously and invariably tests our capacity to look at the evil that surrounds us through different eyes, allowing us to conquer and extract the good within it. Life, which can punish us with unexpected misfortune, can also surprise us with an unimaginably greater good, with a love that supersedes all understanding”.

“This powerful novel speaks to us of pain and suffering, but it also speaks of how the wounds we harbour in our souls can be healed, expanding our capacity to love and forgive as a result. Anne Sophie currently lives in Texas and is the founder of a society whose mission is to “respect life and is the founder of a society whose mission is to “respect life and protect the family from conception to natural death”.

“Badlands is, in short, a true story of a woman whose experience shows us how facing the bleakest moments of our lives can intensify the good within us and even in the deepest, darkest abyss, light can be found.”

Hurry, ask for your copy whilst stocks last!!!