Brothers

"And I ask of you a favour: bless me and the Church of Rome"

Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Pope Francis - the apostle Andrew holds his long separated brother Peter in his arms, and the world changes, just a little.

I was going to write a long piece about this, and I deleted it.  It doesn't need it.  The photograph says more than I could ever do.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Remembering the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador

The text below was written by John D. Whitney S.J. and can be found in its entirity at

https://www.facebook.com/notes/john-d-whitney-sj/standing-with-the-resurrected/10154859340170389?pnref=story

"The murder of these Jesuits and their companions 25 years ago this week is only one small instance of all the unjust deaths that cry out from our world. It is but one moment in a vast history of cruelty and fear, of murder and oppression that stretches from Zimbabwe to Algeria, from the Ukraine to Guantanamo, from the beheadings of ISIS to the unmarked graves of the Mexican teachers. All the victims of oppression and terror, of fear and savagery, of hatred and despair—all who languish in prisons for believing in justice, or who watch their children die in refugee camps because justice will not come, all who suffer under the indifference of their oppressors or by the oppression of those who remain indifferent—all of these call to us today and challenge our professed faith in God and in the resurrection promised through Christ.

The promise of the resurrection is not a promise of life after death, but a promise of life that transcends death. It is a promise, written in the blood of Jesus Christ, that everything we are in faith now, we will be in fullness then. Everything for which we look in hope now, we will see with clarity then. Everything we hold onto now in love, we will possess in fullness then.

In their death, the Jesuits and companions of El Salvador received not resuscitation of their bodies, not life after death, but resurrection. All that had opened to Christ through their work and their teaching, through their manner of life and their witness, became Christ; all in them that had hungered for Christ was filled with Christ; all that had—through the work of their hands—begun to be Christ in the world, returned to them in their witnessing of Christ with their own lives as men and women of the resurrection. "