To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty. ↗
Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing. ↗
In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention. ↗
The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can't leave, you are in effect a captive. ↗
The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament. ↗
Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old. ↗
I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we've got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church. ↗
What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism. ↗
