Holy Land mission is precious, says Pope Francis
Pope highlights the important service of the Commissaries of the Holy Land in a message for their 600th anniversary UCA News reporter Updated: February 15, 2021 07:57 AM GMT
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A view of Jerusalem. (Photo: Vatican News)
The mission to the Holy Land is “precious” and “a seed of fraternity,” Pope Francis said in a message on the 600th anniversary of the establishment of the Commissaries of the Holy Land.
On Feb. 14, the 600th anniversary of the institution of the Commissaries, the pope sent a message to Franciscan Brother Francesco Patton, the Custos of the Holy Land.
Franciscans mark 600 years as guardians of Christendom s most sacred sites
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Heiligland-Netzwerk der Franziskaner feiert 600 Jahre Bestehen
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Welcome to Times will Tell, the newly rebranded weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we go onsite to Qasr Al-Yahud on the banks of the Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptized. We attended the first mass in 54 years at a Franciscan church called the St. John the Baptist Chapel.
Along with another dozen or so churches on both sides of the Jordan near Jericho, the chapel commemorates Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist. This January 10 was the date on which the Catholic church marks the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord or Theophany. Meaning, the priests were commemorating the day of Jesus’s baptism at the place where he was meant to have been baptized some 2,000 years ago.
Israel pumps up religious tourism For the first time since 1967, Christians celebrated Mass at a war-damaged church in the West Bank, near one of the presumed sites of Jesus baptism in the Jordan River
Several people attended a Mass on Sunday, January 10, on the Jordan River in the West Bank, the place presumed to be the place of Jesus baptism. (Photo by NADIM ASFOUR/CTS)
With a fierce wind ruffling their brown habits, some 30 Franciscan friars gathered for a historic Mass last Sunday on the West Bank of the Jordan River at a strange little church that emerges from the beige sands like a small stone vessel.