The situation in Zimbabwe is deteriorating again under a new wave of political violence organised by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, and the country faces another illegitimate election and crisis unless credible, enforceable reforms can first be implemented.

To preserve Southern Africa’s relative peace in the face of rising challenges and threats, Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states must collectively reinforce its peace and security architecture.

No matter people’s struggles, the counselling ministry focuses on a right relationship with God as the beginning of the healing process.

Hope of Israel summer outreach team experiences opposition in Tiberius. However, it doesn't keep them from worshipping and sharing about Jesus.

A friendship naturally leads to a Bible study.

A weekend camp provides young believers a chance to relax and rededicate themselves to the Lord.

An OM worker rediscovers how God can use a difficult situation to accomplish His purposes.

A group of people open to the Holy Spirit's leading find an open door for ministry in Nazareth.

A short-termer engages people in spiritual conversation while on tour of Israel.

A Bible study led by OM team members prompts a special prayer...and God answers!

An Israeli Jew comes to faith in Jesus through the witness of an OM worker.

A Jewish family witnesses the power of Jesus when two Christians pray for a sick boy.

A public baptism ceremony at the river becomes an opportunity to teach an onlooker about the true meaning of baptism.

A search for a friend leads to a conversation about peace in Israel.

An employee is surprised when two Christians come back to visit her a second time, over a year after their first conversation.

The violent turmoil in Israel requires prayer for this people.

The Passover season leads to a young Israeli woman asking about the Passover Lamb.

OM Arts dancers come to Israel and share their art and testimony with locals.

OM Israel is asking for more workers to join a team reaching out to Arabs.

An incorrect GPS coordinate leads a worship team to the end of the road, yet God has another route planned.

A zeal for the Jezreel Valley overcomes fear and insecurity.

The Hope of Israel outreach team visits Yoqneam, a biblical city without a church.

Over 1.2 million people have been affected by the earthquake that hit Guatemala on 7 November. OM Guatemala asks for prayers.

When specific medicine is not available during a medical outreach, OM Guatemala sees God miraculously provide for one mother in need.

OM Guatemala visits primary and secondary schools in the country to teach children values and bring them the good news.

Every time they talked, Maria cried when she shared her problems with an OM Guatemala team member. Now, she is free of suffering and abuse.

These times are testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House, from city halls to corporate suites.

Cycling to reach people in remote villages in Malawi, Yolanda Mamvura experienced a puncture which led her to pray for an epileptic.

An elderly local villager labelled as a witch receives love and practical help from OM Malawi.

A testimony of change in a Malawian village

Miraculous healing from sudden paralysis gives an OM worker opportunity to preach the gospel in a community.

God gets all the glory for the great things He has done through OM the past 50 years. Everyone is looking forward to the next 50 in great anticipation.

After five days of strenuous hiking and altitude sickness, the Freedom Climbers rejoice at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, fittingly called Uhuru (freedom) Peak.

Rome Newsroom, Apr 30, 2020 / 02:01 pm (CNA).- In the central Italian countryside, at the edge of the Umbrian woods just outside Norcia, a group of Benedictine monks prays and works from well before the sun rises until it sets.

This much has not changed in the monks’ lives during Italy’s coronavirus lockdown; but what has is the visitors they receive at the monastery.

“Usually we have some guests coming from all over the world... visitors coming from Italy or the U.S., friends or retreatants,” Fr. Benedict Nivakoff, O.S.B., told CNA by phone.

“And so, the total absence of those people, of that presence, has just focused our prayer all the more and we try to do what we are called to do more seriously,” he said.

“The main thing is a greater intensity of prayer for all those who are suffering.”

Nivakoff is the prior of the monks living at the site of St. Benedict’s birth. After religious life was suppressed in the area in the 1800s, a group led by Fr. Cassian Folsom was given permission to re-establish the monastery and moved there in 2000.

The prior said when the coronavirus was at its height in Italy, the monks did a traditional procession around the property with relics of the true cross.

“And that’s a way of praying for people, invoking the saints and calling down God’s help and his mercy on the country and on the world,” he said.

St. Benedict himself “experienced plagues, famines, sickness, death, not to mention relentless attacks of the devil on him and on his monks. He saw all of those as occasions for the monks themselves and for him to renew his trust and his faith in God,” Nivakoff said.

There is a “sad and persistent temptation,” he explained, to think “the world can solve these problems, but in fact, this world is passing away and God is the only answer to the suffering that we see.”

“So St. Benedict’s message, if you will, would be that all these things that happen can work for the good, and that is for the good of … each man and woman, each monk, in drawing closer to God.”

The monks in Norcia experienced tragedy first-hand four and a half years ago when several earthquakes, including one of 6.6-magnitude, struck central Italy and Norcia in August and October 2016.

The earthquakes destroyed hundreds of homes and the monk’s own buildings, including the Basilica of St. Benedict.

They have been rebuilding, but construction has been on hold during Italy’s lockdown, Nivakoff said, noting that it may, God willing, be able to start back up in a few weeks.

“The earthquake taught us many things and maybe one of the more relevant lessons for today is to resist the temptation that everything should go back exactly as it was,” he said.

“We thought after the earthquake, ‘well the answer is [to rebuild] everything as good if not better than before.’”

“But at the root of that is a fallacy, that this is a world, and we are men touched by original sin, who will only really have happiness and completion and real restoration in heaven,” the prior said.

He noted, “we can and do and need to work to improve things and to bring order where there is chaos and disorder but not at the risk of making this world into the destination and the goal,” because “it isn’t; it’s our temporary place so that we might get to heaven.”

“The earthquake really helped us to see that in a visible form, because the ground was literally shaking beneath our feet,” he said, “and the buildings we had called home to us and to our neighbors, our families, our friends, all the people here in Italy that we know, in central Italy, as all that fell apart.”

He said this “has called for trust and faith that is hard to muster in these days when the faith is so minimal.”

According to Nivakoff, “there are so many” lessons from monastic life that could help people quarantined in their homes right now, but he emphasized “two principle challenges to solitude.”

The first is for those who are in quarantine with others. As for monks who live with other monks, charity is very important when living in the midst of many people, he said.

“This really calls for lots and lots of patience, [and] to remember that patience with others always begins with patience with ourselves,” he explained. “Accepting our sins, accepting our faults, accepting that God is patient with us, and being patient with ourselves, helps us to be more patient with others.”

He added that silence can be a really useful tool in these circumstances: “Not speaking, not responding to the irritating or difficult or perhaps provocative things … people we live with say.”

“Especially under quarantine, the people we live with are probably going to still be with us in a few hours and maybe our passions will have calmed down by then” to respond in a better way, he said.

The second principle he drew on is for those who are living alone, such as the elderly or the young.

“For them, the quarantine really means an eremitical lifestyle. And for them the hardest temptations are sadness, acedia,” Nivakoff said.

“Sadness, which can be good because it can help us to lament our sins, lament not being with God, but at the same time can be a very inward looking and very self-pitying emotion, that stems from expectations not fulfilled.”

He recommended lots of humility and accepting that you are not in charge, not placing hope in things one does not have any control over.

“We have a lot more control over whether we say our prayers at noon than whether the government stops the lockdown in one week,” he pointed out. “The ways to combat sadness are this: to make goals that depend on me, and to put our trust and hope in God.”

Nivakoff also noted that there is a lot of talk right now about the importance of regaining the liberties men and women have had and avoiding “overreach of the government.”

“And that might be true, but from a Christian perspective, it is that we men and women need to accept the limitations that this disease brings on us,” he said.

“So even this terrible virus we need to see as permitted by [God] for some good purpose and the most traditional understanding of that is for some kind of purification.”

“So, we ask for God’s mercy because we need it.”

So during the coronavirus pandemic, the monks continue their prayer and their work taking care of the animals, gardening, cooking, cleaning, and managing the nearby forest.

To support themselves the monks also brew beer, and because it is sold through the internet, the coronavirus has not negatively impacted sales.

“And thank God, that model has really been blessed at this time because with so many people not being able to leave their home, many have taken it as an occasion to sample some monastic beer,” Nivakoff said.

“We continue to export from Italy to the United States and beer is available and it seems to delight many hearts there and we are very happy.”

An annual outreach attracts not only children but also two women, who listen attentively and respond to the message.

Lincoln and Manna from Hong Kong are two of the four candidates to participate in OM EAP’s first Timothy Trek training programme this year.

As OM Hong Kong celebrates 25 years, leader Cheuk-chung Lau reflects on the past 19 years and wonders who the next “Joshua” will be.

Over 350 participants from 95 cities, and from more than 20 denominations, celebrate 50 years of OM ministry in Poland.

Zosia and Monika couldn’t find an addiction therapist within a 60 kilometre radius of their town, so they became therapists themselves.

After hearing about God as a child, Ania reconnected with OM ten years later to learn more and share the truth with her family.

By Andrea Picciotti-Bayer

Our parish’s fall festival was coming to an end. As I rounded up my little ones, I spotted an acquaintance. Antoinette is almost 95 years old and now wheelchair bound, but her incandescent smile inevitably draws people towards her. “Have you had a nice evening?” I asked.
 
 “Oh yes,” she replied, “I spoke for a long time with Father.” 
 
“You know,” I said in a hushed tone, “I think he is a mystic.”
 
 “Yes,” Antoinette said, taking a deep breath, “he saw right to my soul.”
 
A mystic is not some sort of Catholic tarot card reader. A mystic is, in the eyes of traditional Christianity, someone God has given certain gifts and graces to accomplish a specific purpose for the salvation of souls. Some of the Church’s notable mystics include great saints like St. Padre Pio, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena. Their extraordinary ability to sense God transformed their hearts. Theirs were hearts moved to quiet and solitude when necessary, but also to action and service to souls and the Church. They were obedient to God and Church, and – not unrelatedly – they were profoundly humble. 
 
Now, we shouldn’t think that the exceptional relationship that mystics had with God is just for an elite, holy few. No, not at all. Mystics walk among us in our everyday lives – Antoinette’s and my parish priest, for example – and a mystical relationship with God is open to us all. In fact, God longs to connect with each one of our hearts and transform them for His glory. To that end, National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez has just compiled a beautiful daily devotional, A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living, that can help open our hearts to such prayerful, mystical encounters with God. Lopez’ message is simple: “You too can be a mystic.”
 
“I don’t pretend to either be a mystic or an expert on mysticism,” she writes. “But I do pray enough to know that so very few us of us have plumbed the depths of what God wants to reveal to us and do in us through prayer.”
 
A Year with the Mystics features brief, daily meditations grounded in the writings and prayers of the Catholic Church’s well-known mystics – Padre Pio, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, for example.  Lopez also includes the words of “active saints in the world,” figures not conventionally thought of as mystics such as Mother Teresa and Mother Angelica.
 
The book is not a formulaic, chapter-by-chapter guide to the interior life. Rather, each day’s reflection invites the reader into a particular contemplation. “Entering into the light,” “Divine friendship,” “Looking in the mirror, seeing light and virtue,” “Pray without ceasing? A how-to” are some of my most favorite daily invitations. Lopez follows up with a brief introduction to an inspired writing, the excerpt itself, a consideration and then a final prayer. The reading and daily meditation takes a brief 15 minutes, but it can inspire an entire holy hour or direct your entire day. It’s worth pointing out that the book is beautifully bound and sturdy enough to survive transport in a purse, briefcase, or the door pocket of the car so that not one day of contemplation is missed.    
 
I have turned to this little volume often in my prayers since receiving my review copy. And I have found great consolation – the kind of consolation I saw on Antoinette’s smiling face after she spoke with Father John at the parish festival.  
 
For most of us, the mystical union with God will be found as contemplatives in an often loud and busy world. Inviting the mystics to accompany us along our journey of contemplation presents an opportunity for incredible growth in our prayerful encounter with God. In A Year with the Mystics, Kathryn Jean Lopez has mapped a lovely and useful path to facilitate this encounter. “Be not afraid as you’ve heard and will read,” she writes “Let him bring you to a peace that surpasses all understanding, even as he brings you into a deeper understanding in the heart of the Trinity.”

By Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie

Coronavirus is only the latest iteration of an age-old human affliction. Even now, with the benefit of advanced medical science, our reaction – our confusion, our fear – is not so different from how our ancestors experienced recurrent and terrifying onslaughts of plague, cholera, and yellow fever across the ages. We can learn from the courage and ingenuity of those who travelled this road before us.
 
Consider the work of Dr. Carlos Finlay in Cuba. In 1880 he hypothesized, and then worked to prove his hypothesis, that yellow fever, a disease that regularly decimated coastal populations up and down the Americas, was spread by infected mosquitos. Those mosquitos came to our shores in the 17th century on African slave ships and attacked portal communities in the tropics as well as cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia. The resulting epidemics occurred with oppressive regularity in the summer months, to the people’s great dread, with mortality rates as high as 50 percent. The impact was tremendous – not only in the milllions of lives lost and the wretchedness this caused, but in economic gains and opportunities wiped out or delayed (the Panama Canal).
 
Connecting the transmission of the deadly virus to its source or vector was a decisive step forward in the long struggle against yellow fever. It preceded the development of a vaccine by more than 60 years. Here's how it happened: A young doctor, Carlos Finlay, returned to his home in Havana one night, exhausted, after caring for a Carmelite priest dying of yellow fever. Realizing he had forgotten to say his daily rosary, he sat in his armchair, sweating in the oppressive heat, fingering his beads and swatting at a bothersome mosquito. Suddenly, inspiration pierced his depression and weariness: Could the mosquito, like the one annoying him that moment, be transmitting the infection from person to person? If so, this was marvelous. One could not fight the brutal steamy summer air – the miasma – but one could fight mosquitos.
 
Inspiration, however, was not enough to proceed. Courage and even heroism would be needed to prove Finlay’s hypothesis. These were at hand, thanks to 57 young Jesuit priests and brothers who volunteered as experimental subjects. As each arrived from Spain to staff the Colegio de Belen, newly founded by Queen Isabel II of Spain, he was met by Finlay, carrying a test tube filled with mosquitos that had just fed on a patient sick with yellow fever. Taking their lives in their hands, these Jesuits allowed themselves to be bitten for the sake of their fellow human beings. Three died of the bite, but all 57 were willing to do the same.
 
Subsequent experiments supported Finlay’s hypothesis. Although a vaccine to definitively eradicate the disease would not come for decades, Finlay’s insight helped man to co-exist safely with yellow fever until that time. The incidence of yellow fever in Cuba dropped precipitously through mosquito control. Standing water, a breeding ground for the noxious pests, was eliminated where possible or treated aggressively with insecticides where not. Panama, where tens of thousands of workers had already died of the disease while building the canal followed Cuba’s lead. The last Panama Canal worker to die of yellow fever came in 1906.
 
There are important lessons for us here -- first and foremost, lessons in resourcefulness and valor. 
 
Already, thousands of human minds are, today, tenaciously working to find a solution to Covid-19. They’re persisting without respite, persisting through depression and fatigue, to find a way forward. Just as Dr. Finlay did.
 
And, you can depend on it, inspiration is sure to strike again.
 
You can also see today the same kind of valor that animated the Jesuit volunteers who let the infected mosquitos bite them. You see it in the countless men and women who keep showing up for work at nursing homes or crowded food production lines. Their examples help us all to keep up and increase our courage so we can join them as we ease back into our normal daily lives.
 
As we face the moment when we too realize that we have no choice but to go back out into the world of work and personal interactions, we can take hope from contemplating our predecessors’ success in confronting yellow fever. Like us, they dreamed of a vaccine. But they didn’t lock themselves away until it was developed. They found a way to steel themselves and then to steal the deadly efficiency away from the virus that plagued them. A century later, we can do the same.

Denver Newsroom, May 8, 2020 / 05:29 pm (CNA).- Mother’s Day is going to look different for most families this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Catholics, some churches are in the process of slowly re-opening public Masses, but the dispensation from the Sunday obligation continues to stand, as the virus has not gone away and a cure or vaccine has yet to be found.

While most Catholics are eager to return to Mass, a small group of Catholics are relieved that they will not be sitting in a public pew this Mother’s Day.

“We actually heard from one woman who said, ‘I kind of feel badly about saying this, but I'm sort of glad that we won't be in the pews this year for Mother's Day,’” Ann Koshute, founder of Springs in the Desert Catholic ministry, told CNA.


“That's something that we hear and that everybody I think on the team has experienced at one point in this journey,” she said - the desire to avoid Mass on Mother’s Day. That’s because Koshute, along with other members of her ministry, have had painful experiences with infertility, and the customary Mother’s Day blessing given to mothers at many parishes that day can bring their grief and sense of loss poignantly to the fore.


“I think that so often people in our own families, our friends, and even our pastors don't really understand the full extent of the pain and the grief or even the full extent of the issue of infertility, of how many couples are really dealing with it,” she said.


The pain of infertility, and the lack of resources available to Catholics on the subject, was why Koshute and her friend, Kimberly Henkel, founded Springs in the Desert, a Catholic ministry to spiritually and emotionally support women and couples experiencing infertility and infant loss. Originally, Henkel and Koshute, who have both experienced infertility, thought they might write a book. But they decided to start with a ministry website and a blog that could bring people together and allow for other women and couples to share their experiences. The group is relatively new, and held its first retreat in Philadelphia in December. They were set to hold a second one this weekend - Mother’s Day weekend - in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, when, well, the pandemic hit.

Now, they’ve moved the retreat online and opened it up to Catholics across the country - and they’ve been overwhelmed by the response.

“We thought that we would be really excited if maybe a couple dozen people found out about it and came. We are over 100 participants now. And it's free and it's going to be available all weekend,” Koshute said. The retreat is trying to address the emotional and spiritual experience of infertility and loss for a broad range of people, Henkel said - from mothers who have miscarried, to women who are past child-bearing years and still grieving the loss of infertility, to women “who feel like their biological clocks are ticking and just haven’t met the right guy.” But now that it's a virtual, pre-recorded, watch-at-your-leisure retreat, it also has the potential to reach a population that is often more reluctant to gather in groups and talk about their experiences of infertility: men. “It's mostly women who are emailing us (about the retreat), although we know that many of their husbands will watch with them. But we've also had a few men email us,” Koshute said.


“One in particular, it just really touched my heart. And he said that he was searching the web for help for his wife on Mother's Day. And I was just so filled with praise and thanksgiving to God for that, for a husband to see that hurt in his wife and to want to find a way to help her,” she added. Men and women typically experience the grief of infertility quite differently, Koshute noted. “For us women, it's so visceral because life is conceived within us and we carry that life. But for a man, it's so different,” she said.

“(Men are) kind of distant from that experience until the child is actually born. And so I think many times men, the grief and the burden that they carry is their wife's. They really carry her sadness and I think feel at a loss because they want to make everything right. They want to fix this, and they want to make her whole. And the mystery of infertility is that it's not that simple. And that's one of the things that makes it so difficult,” she said. Henkel said she experienced her own difficulties in trying to discuss infertility with her husband. Now that they’ve experienced the joy of growing their family through adoption, she said, he is much more open to inviting other men to share their experiences. Henkel said she is hoping that an additional benefit of this retreat being online is that it will facilitate discussions between couples watching the videos together. Both Henkel and Koshute said that while the experience of infertility and loss is painful, and they want to help couples acknowledge and accept that pain, they also want Springs in the Desert to be a positive and supportive experience for couples and women, where they can find hope and redemption even in their suffering. One of the topics they focus on is how all women are called to motherhood in their lives, whether it is spiritual or biological.

“My experience has shown me that my motherhood is really engaged in so many ways that I never considered before,” Koshute said.

“Not just with my godson or with other children in my family, but with women who are older than I who are friends and who might come to me with a difficulty or problem and I can help them,” or by helping family members in need or through charitable works, she added. “That's one of the messages that we try to get across to women and to couples as well, that those kinds of things, what we would maybe refer to as spiritual motherhood, is not illegitimate,” she said.

“It's not second-place. It's a real way of engaging and living out our motherhood. It's also not a replacement for a baby. So it's not as if you go out and volunteer in your community and now you won't have this longing for a child anymore. But we've really found through our own experience and through talking with other women that the more we kind of put ourselves out there and give ourselves to others, the more that we can begin to see that motherhood enacted in us.”

Henkel said she also likes to encourage couples to look at the ways God is calling them to be fruitful in their marriages outside of biological children.

“We really encourage these couples that they are not forgotten, they're not being punished. That God loves them so much and that he has something amazing for them. He's using this to draw them near to him and to allow them to cry out to him and ask for him to guide them, to lead them, to give them his love and show them what fruitfulness he has for them, what place in ministry and mission he has for them.” Henkel and her husband in particular like to share with couples their experience of foster care as one example of where God might be calling them to be fruitful. After a frustrating and expensive experience with some adoption agencies, Henkel and her husband decided to look into giving a home to children through foster care.

“Here is a situation where these children really need families,” she said. “It's hard because there's no guarantee you're going to get to keep this child, so there's a sense of this new greater level of having to learn how to trust God.” “I think that with a couple discerning that fruitfulness, it's also discerning - where is God really calling you? There's so much need in this world. And he wants to use us.”

Couples interested in the Springs in the Desert Mother’s Day weekend retreat can sign up for free online at the Springs in the Desert website. Content will be uploaded and available for anyone who registers, Henkel said, even if they register late. The retreat team will also be hosting a live talk on Sunday, May 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern on the ministry’s Facebook page.

“There's a place for you in Springs of the Desert,” Henkel added. “There's so many women who have reached out to us in Philly. We added several more women to our group, to our team, our official team, women who came to the retreat. One woman had come there and she said she had had a miscarriage, and neither one of us has experienced that. So we said, please join us. We want your voice.”

“We're trying to really bring the voices of many different women to our team so that people will feel there is somebody that is talking they can really relate to. Because there are all of these different situations, but they've got obviously a very similar undercurrent.”

A group of fourteen OM volunteers recently started organising meetings for ten- to thirteen-year-olds in Mexico: the ‘Butterfly Club’. It´s a weekly gathering of thirty young girls in Hermosillo, Mexico. They come from a vulnerable environment with broken families that lack many basic resources.

Young girls in Mexico learn about abuse and many open up about their own experiences.

Times are changing for OM Mexico, with new staff and a new office.

When Carmen Cervantes started attending OM Mexico’s workshops on missions, she never thought her six-year-old son would be interested too.

Marco Salas and his wife SeRah Kim have taken on the leadership of OM Mexico. They were encouraged by many fellow OM workers.

Veracruz, Mexico :: Workers from Central Asia share their stories and challenge event participants to think about their part in global missions.