Cardinal to preach at cathedral in front of remains of Richard III

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Cardinal to preach at cathedral in front of remains of Richard III

Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster is to take part in services marking the reinterment of Richard III at Leicester’s Anglican cathedral in March next year.

The cardinal will preach at a service of compline on the day the king’s remains are received into the cathedral and will celebrate a Requiem Mass the next day at a nearby Catholic parish.

Dominican friars will also sing vespers at the cathedral in the run-up to the reinterment and Fr David Rocks OP, parish priest, will preach at a lunchtime Eucharist.

The schedule, as released by the Catholic Communications Network, is as follows:

Sunday, 22 March 2015
Leicester Cathedral
The remains of Richard III will be received into the cathedral and an invited congregation will pray a service of Compline where Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, will preach.

Monday, 23 March 2015
Holy Cross Church, Leicester
Cardinal Nichols will celebrate Mass for the repose of the soul – a ‘Requiem Mass’ – of Richard III in Holy Cross Church, the Catholic parish church and Dominican priory in Leicester city centre. The choir from St Barnabas’ Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Diocese of Nottingham, will sing at this Mass, which will be open to the public.

Thursday, 26 March 2015
Leicester Cathedral
The mortal remains of Richard III will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral, with an invited congregation and in the presence of the Most Revd Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and senior clergy from both dioceses, and other Christian denominations alongside representatives of the World Faiths.

Friday, 27 March 2015
Leicester Cathedral
Invited guests from across the city of Leicester and the county of Leicestershire will gather in the Cathedral to mark the end of King Richard’s journey and the sealed tomb will be revealed to the public.

In addition:

The regular pattern of morning and evening prayer and the Eucharist will be kept by Leicester Cathedral throughout these days as we prepare for the King’s reinterment. A number of these services will have a very special character. All these services will be open to the public.

On Tuesday 24 March the Dominican friars will sing Vespers, the Catholic Church’s evening service, in Leicester Cathedral; this is in addition to the daily celebration of Mass and the divine office in Holy Cross Church.

On Wednesday 25 March, Father David Rocks OP, the parish priest at Holy Cross Church, will preach at the lunchtime Eucharist in Leicester Cathedral.

Further information about each service will be released in due course. Leicester Cathedral will be open for people to visit, to pay their respects and to pray from 23-25 March, and from Saturday 28 March the area around Richard III’s tomb will be open to the public.

Original Post by catholic herald

Pope Francis accepts resignation of Cardinal Seán Brady

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Pope Francis accepts resignation of Cardinal Seán Brady

The Pope has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Seán Brady as the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.

The cardinal, who passed the retirement age of 75 on August 16, will be succeeded by Archbishop Eamon Martin.

Archbishop Martin was appointed coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh by Benedict XVI on January 18 2013.

In a statement, Cardinal Brady said: “I am pleased that Pope Francis has today accepted the resignation which I offered to him on the occasion of my 75th birthday. I warmly congratulate Archbishop Eamon Martin who today becomes Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland and Coarb Phadraic. Let us rejoice and be glad.

“I pray that God may give to Archbishop Eamon in abundance all the graces he needs and I assure him of my help and total support at all times. Indeed I am quite confident that the people of the archdiocese – priests, religious and lay faithful – will give to their new archbishop the same whole-hearted support and faith-filled loyalty which they have always given to me and for which I will be eternally grateful.

Cardinal Brady recalled that he had been appointed a bishop by St John Paul II, worked closely with Benedict XVI and took part in the conclave that elected Pope Francis.

“That conclave has been the highlight of my life,” he said. “Pope Francis’s motto, Miserando atque eligendo, challenges and inspires me with its message of God having mercy and at the same time choosing us, despite our sinfulness. It reminds me that I too need to say sorry and to ask forgiveness. And I do so again, now. At the same time, Pope Francis’s motto inspires me to trust in the mercy of God and to pray for the strength to do always as Jesus would have me do.

“The people of the Archdiocese of Armagh and the people of Ireland will remain in my prayers for the rest of my life. I ask the favour of your prayers to help me continue to serve God as best I can all the days God gives me. God bless you always.”

In his statement, Archbishop Eamon Martin, 52, said: “During my years as executive secretary to the Irish Bishops’ Conference I saw at first hand the mammoth amount of work undertaken by Cardinal Brady as President of the Episcopal Conference and his tireless commitment to representing the Catholic Church in Ireland at countless national and international engagements. At the same time he always presents as a gentle and humble man who is never fully comfortable in the limelight. I want to thank Cardinal Seán personally for the kindness he has shown me since I came to Armagh last year, and for allowing me every opportunity to get to know the diocese. I know that I can count on his prayers and support in the years to come.

“I genuinely feel honoured to assume the role of ‘Shepherd’ in the Archdiocese of Armagh. I look forward to serving the people of 61 parishes in the counties of Armagh, Derry, Louth and Tyrone. I feel humbled to be following in the footsteps of St Patrick, and like him, I pray for ‘God’s strength to pilot me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s shield to protect me’. Over the past 16 months I have been encouraged and inspired by the enthusiasm of our young people and the dedication of our teachers, the commitment and pastoral care given by our priests and religious, and the willingness of so many people to become actively involved in the life of their parishes and diocese.

“I was ordained a bishop just a month after the election of Pope Francis. I chose my episcopal motto to be: ‘Sing a New Song to the Lord’, because I think we are all being challenged nowadays to find fresh ways of bringing the Gospel into the world. Pope Francis inspires us to write that new song in a ‘missionary key’, and reach out to everyone in society with the love and friendship of Jesus. People have been asking me to put ‘fresh heart’ into the renewal of the Church in this country.

“But I am only one person with all my inadequacies and sinfulness. The task of bringing the encouragement of faith to the world belongs to all of us – people, priests, religious Sisters and brothers, bishops – working together in communion with Christ and with one another. I am certain that a humble renewal in the Church in Ireland will only come about as our lay people exercise their specific vocation and mission to hand on the faith and to insert the Gospel into the reality of their daily lives and work.

“I pray that my heart can be more like the Heart of Jesus, burning with love for everyone. Not far from all of us today are people who feel isolated or lonely; people whose hearts are heavy with worry, illness or anxiety; perhaps someone whose heart is broken by grief or loss; a man or woman whose heart has grown colder because of some cruelty or emptiness in their lives – past or present. Every day, then, as long as this today lasts, let us keep encouraging one another with the love and compassion of Christ.”

Archbishop Martin said he would celebrate Mass on October 7 at his cathedral “to ask God’s blessing and the protection of Mary at this important milestone for me and for the archdiocese”.

Original Post by Catholic herald

Jackie Kennedy’s messages to Priests handed over to Kennedy family

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Jackie Kennedy’s messages to Priests handed over to Kennedy family

Letters between former US first lady Jackie Kennedy and a Dublin-based priest have been handed over to the Kennedy family.

In a statement issued on Friday, the Vincentian order said they wished “to confirm that private letters, written by the late Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy to our deceased confrere, Fr Joseph Leonard, have been transferred to the Kennedy family”.

“This has taken place with regard to the respect due to what is correspondence of a private nature,” the statement said before adding that the Vincentians will be making no further comment on the matter.

The letters exchanged by Kennedy and Fr Leonard were set to be auctioned in Dublin earlier this year to raise funds for struggling All Hallows College. However, the letters were later withdrawn for sale on the insistence of the Vincentian order amid public controversy about the private nature of the correspondence. The college later announced that it would have to close down due to a lack of funds and had hoped the sale of the letters would plug the gap.

The letters had been expected to sell for as much as $1.3 million (£800,000).

One letter, dated January 1964 – just weeks after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated – revealed how the tragedy left Kennedy struggling with her Catholic faith.

“I am so bitter against God,” she wrote, but added “only he and you and I know that.”

Kennedy wrote the letters between 1950 and 1964 to Father Leonard, whom she first met when she visited Dublin as a student in 1950. They began a correspondence that continued until his death in 1964. The letters also revealed that Kennedy credited the priest with her return to Catholicism after a period when she had lapsed in the practice of her faith.

Original Post by catholic herald

Church render services to Women ‘The rest of which the World has left behind’

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Church render services to Women ‘The rest of which the World has left behind’

Washington D.C., Sep 7, 2014 / 04:32 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Recent claims that the Catholic Church disregards women fail to acknowledge the Church’s critical work to support women and families around the world, say leaders in medicine, academia and global relief work.

“Anyone who thinks that the Catholic Church doesn’t support women doesn’t know much about the Church, its mission and its presence around the world,” said Joan Rosenhauer, Executive Vice President of US Operations for Catholic Relief Services.

“Every day, the Catholic community supports women with opportunities to strengthen their families, become better educated, and build their economic and food security. Our presence across the globe, including in some of the most remote places on earth, allows us to help many women the rest of the world has left behind,” she told CNA Aug. 27.

A recent “Poverty Matters” blog post in the British daily The Guardian criticized the Church as being anti-woman. Entitled “Pope Francis has done little to improve women’s lives,” the blog post argued particularly against the Church’s stance on human sexuality.

Rosenhauer pointed to several initiatives Catholic Relief Services has started to help alleviate poverty, particularly for women and their families. For example, the Savings and Internal Lending Communities program has provided loans to more than 1 million people – over 80 percent of them women – to help start small family businesses or help women to become financially independent.

Additionally, Rosenhauer said, “thousands of girls and women are being helped around the world every day through Church-run programs focusing on maternal and child nutrition, girls’ education, and livelihoods for women, to name just a few.” CRS runs programs that both distribute food in times of need and teach farming techniques that aid with food production and nutrition.

The Catholic Church, she continued, also provides programming, such as The Faithful House in sub-Saharan Africa, that helps strengthen families and relationships between spouses in order to help families find their basis in loving, respectful relationships.

Participants in the Faithful House, she said “report decreased alcohol use, better management of household finances, improved budgeting and savings, and the ability to pay for essential items such as school fees, household repairs, and transportation.” One participant comment that “by the time our children have their own families, society will be better than it is now because children learn from watching their parents in a loving and respectful relationship.”

The Church’s sexual teachings also help support women and families, Rosenhauer said. Catholic Relief Service’s work to teach Natural Family Planning methods help “women adopt life-affirming ways to space births in order to reduce the risk of the mothers dying during labor and improve the chances that babies will be born healthy and thrive.”

Other organizations corroborate the Church’s emphasis on providing life-affirming development policies. In 2009, Dr. Donna J. Harrison, president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, briefed the U.N. Commissioner on Human Rights on the risks of promoting abortion as part of attempts to aid international development or address maternal mortality.

The provision of abortion in developing countries, Harrison wrote, “increases, not decreases maternal mortality and morbidity in resource poor nations,” increasing the “risk of hemorrhage, infection and incomplete abortion” in such areas.

The promotion of abortion as a development policy, she continued, also diverts funds and attention from interventions that have been proven to help reduce maternal mortality and increase overall health such as “prenatal care, skilled birth attendants, antibiotics and oxytocics.”

Helen Alvare, law professor at George Mason University and consultor for the Pontifical Council for the Laity, called critics of the Church’s reproductive and sexual teachings to consider the importance of these teachings in helping save the lives of the poor.

Abortion destroys lives, she told CNA, notably “millions of children, and their mothers suffering the physical, psychological and spiritual aftermath of a surgery unlike any other on earth.”

The Church’s teachings also help protect the most vulnerable members of society – particularly women, children and the poor – from “the sex and mating markets that grow up when sex is divorced even from the idea of kids.”

The promotion of birth control and abortion in such schemas, Alvare noted, leads to an increase in the “rates of single moms and rates of abortions,” as well as a decline in marriage rates.

Original Post by Catholic news agency

No Amount of Skills can Compare to God’s Favour

CM Editor
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No Amount of Skills can Compare to God’s Favour

No Amount of Skills can Compare  to God’s Favour 

Azendoo Allows you to Collaborate On Tasks And Documents Between Multiple Services

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Azendoo Allows you to Collaborate On Tasks And Documents Between Multiple Services

Azendoo is not yet another task manager — it’s the glue that brings together all the services that you already use. The French startup took another approach to task and document management by focusing on third-party integrations.

Let’s say you use Evernote for your to-do lists. Your coworker can assign a task to you in Azendoo, and the service will seamlessly add it to your Evernote account. Whenever you mark the task as done in Evernote, Azendoo will reflect the change on its platform.

In other words, Azendoo is able to turbocharge Evernote with task collaboration. The startup recently won an Evernote Platform Award.

Similarly, Google Drive, Box and Dropbox users can collaborate on the same document — Azendoo will sync the file between these services.

“Azendoo is much more than a shared to-do list,” co-founder and CEO Grégory Lefort told me in a phone interview. “We provide a cross-platform service that syncs all your data.”

Currently, most people use multiple to-do list platforms, such as personal apps like Evernote and Wunderlist, professional services like Asana and Producteev, and even emails and post-it notes. At the very beginning, Azendoo competed directly with existing to-do apps. But it wasn’t very effective because users already had a Box account, an Evernote account, etc.

The team quickly realized that it was more interesting to become the central puzzle piece that holds everything together and removes pain points rather than to convince potential users that they should switch to another service to store their to-do data and documents.

Azendoo currently integrates with Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google and Skype. The startup now has 240,000 users, including people working for Nike and Coca-Cola, people studying at Stanford and more. Some integrations aren’t as effective as the Evernote one, but the company will improve existing integrations to make it work better.

If an integration is not seamless and thorough, it’s not good enough. “We don’t want to create a service for other tech startups. We want people working in marketing, support, sales, education and non-profit to use Azendoo,” Lefort said. Right now, it’s a pretty nifty product with a lot of potential.

Original Post by Techcrunch

Twitter Announces Its First Commerce Product — A “Buy” Button On Mobile

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Twitter Announces Its First Commerce Product — A “Buy” Button On Mobile

After months of reports and rumors, Twitter is announcing its first commerce product.

The company first signaled its interest in this area last year, when it hired former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard to lead its commerce team. Then it started recruiting other commerce specialists, and Recode got its hands on mock-ups of a Buy Now button. Over the summer, people started spotting those buttons in the wild.

So Twitter is officially announcing that Buy button today — in a blog post, the company says it will be visible to “a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time).” As a result, users will actually be able to make purchases directly within tweets. If you see something you want, you hit “buy”, bring up a little information, enter your payment and shipping information while still Twitter (it’s encrypted and stored for future purchases), and complete the transaction “in just a few taps.”

And even though the test is starting out on mobile, a company spokesperson said it will be moving onto desktop soon as well.

Twitter says it’s partnering with a number of companies to make the Buy Now button happen, starting social shopping company Fancy, digital content seller Gumroad, fan commerce company Musictoday, and payments company Stripe. The initial sellers include musicians (Demi Lovato, Eminem, Pharrell), nonprofits (Donors Choose, Glide, RED), and retailers (Burberry, The Home Depot).

Gumroad founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia told me his team has been talking to Twitter about possible commerce features for more than a year: “It was more like a when, not if, question for them.” Where Gumroad is involved in these initial purchases, Lavingia said it’s usually working with musicians (though he wants to go broader), with Stripe handling the actual payment processing. When you make the purchase, the interface is supposedly “native on the Twitter client”, so you might not realize that anyone was involved except Twitter — until you get your receipt.

Lavingia added that creating a purchase experience that’s “really simple and really fast has always been super important for us” and that he hopes that similar experiences will “over time become the norm because of things like Twitter.”

For its part, Twitter describes this as “an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun,” so you can probably expect its commerce initiatives to expand. (We’ve also heard that the company was working on something closer to a marketplace separate from the main river of content.)

This seems like a pretty natural avenue for expansion — not only is it a potential source of revenue on its own, but if Twitter successfully drives sales, that could encourage businesses to become more active on the service and to advertise more.

Facebook, meanwhile, is building out a commerce platform of its own.

Original Post by Techcrunch

App Analytics Startup Adjust Raises $7.6 Million Series C

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App Analytics Startup Adjust Raises $7.6 Million Series C

Well, what do we have here? A European series C round. Berlin-headquartered app analytics startup Adjust (if we can still call the company a startup) has raised a $7.6 million further round of funding from ACTIVE Venture Partners, and existing investors Target Partners, Iris Capital and Capnamic Ventures. Formerly known as Adeven, Adjust raised a $4.3 million round in June last year, adding to an earlier European-style “seven-figure” series A round of funding.

Adjust, which, along with Berlin, has offices in San Francisco and Istanbul, provides an analytics platform to help mobile marketers understand where their “most valuable” users come from, and other info, in a bid to offer ways to “re-engage” those users inside or outside their app — i.e. through various advertising and marketing initiatives and channels — and measure that additional return of investment (ROI).

The company is an official Facebook and Twitter Mobile Measurement Partner and integrates with 300 or so ad networks and partners globally. It boasts the likes of Universal Music, Viacom, Yelp, Scopely, Kingsoft, DeNA, BuzzFeed Inc. and Deutsche Telekom, as clients.

So, what’s an app analytics startup to do with $7.6 million in fresh series C funding? Adjust says it’ll use the new cash to boost expansion in the U.S., China and Japan, and for further product development. Noteworthy, it says 40 per cent of total revenue is now coming from Asia and the U.S., and that the company will use some of the additional funding to open new regional offices. To that end, it has hired Shawn Bonham, who previously for mobile analytics company Upsight, to lead Asian expansion as Adust’s new Managing Director Japan and South East Asia.

Original Post by Techcrunch

Little Zion Church of Christ in Norwalk, United Kingdom was struck by lightning

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Little Zion Church of Christ in Norwalk, United Kingdom was struck by lightning

A Norwalk church was damaged after officials say it was struck by lightning during Saturday’s storm.

It happened at the Little Zion Church of Christ of the Apostolic Faith on Martin Luther King Drive.

The lightning set fire to the steeple.

Firefighters say the damage is mainly to the roof and shingles of the church….

Original Post by Connecticut News 12

Nigeria: RCCG Empowers FCT Youths With Cooking Skills

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Nigeria: RCCG Empowers FCT Youths With Cooking Skills

The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) FCT 1 has concluded plans to empower some youths in the FCT with cooking skills that would enable them become self-employed in the lucrative hospitality industry.

Pastor Godwin Idoje of the Offspring of David Parish of the church disclosed this today while speaking with our reporter on the church’s readiness for the third edition of the church’s annual youths cooking competition billed for September 20 in Abuja.

“This competition was born out of concern based on the trends of events noticed among our youths. We believe that the ability to cook well will contribute to the well-being of the family while making them self-reliant also,” he said.

Idoje noted that it was worrisome that many youths in this modern age especially young women don’t know how to cook.

He said the competition was also borne out of a need to ensure that upon marriage, families are assured of properly cooked and balanced meals, adding that this year’s competition will be held in collaboration with Chef Academy and Kyom NOM electronics.

“More so, good meals at home would prevent people from eating bad or contaminated meals outside and children will be well nourished and that’s why we started this programme,” Idoje said.

Also speaking at the event, Daniel Okiodike of Dechef’s Kitchen said that irrespective of gender, youths seeking employment but have very good culinary skills could be self-employed.

“Food is very important to human existence and it is something we cannot do without; so you must know how to cook. Once you know how to cook very good delicacies, you’ll see that you can even turn it into a very good business and be self employed,” he said.

A three-time winner of a cooking award himself, Okiodike said culinary skills were a form of youth empowerment.

He advised Nigerian youths to see cooking as a lucrative business and shouldn’t be constrained to doing it just for pleasure.

Original Post by All Africa

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