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A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zieba, OP, died in his native Wroc?aw, Poland, on December 31. The birthplace of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wroclaw was also the home of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who grew up there as Edith Stein when the city was known as Breslau. Unlike those great Christian witnesses, Maciej Zieba was not a martyr; but he, too, gave his life for Christ and the Church, and he bore more than his share of suffering in doing so.
His life was dramatically changed by John Paul II s first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979. Hearing the pope s eloquent summons to Poles to reject the communist culture of the life by reclaiming the truth about themselves as a nation, the young university student of physics thought, We might have to live and die under communism. But I can live without being a liar. Opportunities to act on that determination multiplied when the Solidarity movement was born in the fall of 1980. Maciej Zieba quickly became involved
In 2007, the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean completed their fifth general conference with a final report, known from the Brazilian city where they met as the Aparecida Document. Its principal authors included Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, then the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Thanks to the efforts of the future pope and others, the Aparecida Document remains an exemplary description of what it means to be the Church of the New Evangelization and not only in Latin America. Paragraph 436 of the Aparecida Document is of particular interest in the United States today:
We hope that legislators, heads of government, and health professionals, conscious of the dignity of human life and of the rootedness of the family in our peoples, will defend and protect it from the abominable crimes of abortion and euthanasia; that is their responsibility.. We must adhere to eucharistic coherence, that is, be conscious that they [i.e., legislators, heads of government, and health p
Echoes What the Magi teach us Published 12/23/2020 thebostonpilot.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thebostonpilot.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.