Pope Francis closed the Year of Faith by calling on people to keep Christ at the center of their lives, especially in times of trouble. "When Jesus is at the center, light shines even the darkest moments of our lives; he gives us hope," he said in his homily November 24, the feast of Christ the King. The closing Mass in St. Peter's Square also saw, for the first time, the exposition for public veneration of bones believed to be those of St. Peter. The apostle is believed to have been martyred on a hill overlooking St. Peter's Square and buried a tomb now located two levels below the main altar of St. Peter's Basilica. Eight bone fragments, each two to three centimeters long, were nestled in an open bronze reliquary displayed to the side of the altar. During the ceremony, the pope -- the 265th successor of Peter -- held the closed reliquary for several minutes in silent prayer while choirs sang the Nicene Creed in Latin. The bones, which were discovered during excavations of the necropolis under St. Peter's Basilica in the 1940s, are kept in the pope's private chapel but had never been displayed in public. While no pope has ever declared the bones to be authentic, Pope Paul VI said in 1968 that the "relics" of St. Peter had been "identified in a way which we can hold to be convincing." How can you not love Pope Francis? His honesty and decision to make the papacy as transparent as possible recalls the ministry of Jesus Christ while He was on earth. I am thankful that God has decided to allow Pope Francis to lead His church.

The devastation brought on by Super Typhoon Haiyan is on a scale so big it is "unimaginable," said Jesuit Father Edwin Gariguez, head of Caritas in the Philippines. "This is beyond our capacity," said Father Gariguez, "that's the reason why we have our Caritas network with us now." When the typhoon hit November 8, the CRS country representative to the Philippines, Joe Curry, was already in Bohol dealing with relief from the October 15 earthquake, so CRS was able to get its assessment teams to Leyte November 10. With about 600,000 people displaced by the storm, the task of getting aid to Filipinos posed a challenge in terms of coordination and the logistics. International aid started began arriving the week of November 10, while local relief began immediately after the typhoon hit. But five days after the storm cut a path of damage that obliterated as many as 90 percent of the houses in some areas, there were still stories of people not receiving anything. Adelyn Manos was one of those. At the entrance of the Villiamor Air Base in Manila, she took cover from the rain under at a tarp-covered shuttle stop. She had just arrived via military plane from Tacloban, a city in Leyte that some are calling "ground zero" because of the decimation there from a 15-foot storm surge brought on by Haiyan. It left bodies strewn about in its wake. "I came with them, my three children and a companion," said the 35-year-old Manos, carrying her 3-year-old daughter. "And my other child, she died because the water went up so high ... she was not even buried because there are no coffins there." Her 8-year-old son said: "The water was so high. It was so high," as he put his arm up to indicate the flood's depth. Manos said she decided to come to Manila because none of the food packs being distributed had made their way to her neighborhood. Her husband was living in Manila for work, but he did not even know she had arrived because her cellphone got clogged with water. Reporters helped her contact her husband and were trying to arrange for a ride. Philippine President Benigno Aquino said he expected the death toll to be around 2,500 -- lower than initially predicted. That morning, the government put the death toll at 1,833; of those, 1,300 were in Leyte. The same day, Rene Almendras, the president's Cabinet secretary, said all national roads leading to the island provinces of Leyte, Samar to the east and nearby Biliran were open and passable. Provincial bus service also was back online, and airports had been opened. At least two of those would be hubs for receiving relief goods. But the government was still dealing with the enormity of the tasks at hand. In one case, the sheer volume of the goods arriving made it necessary for peace and order officers originally assigned to clearing operations to be baggers of care packages. Bodies continued to turn up, and Almendras said some locations did not have enough body bags. Jesuit Brother James Lee, head of the Church That Serves the Nation, the social justice arm of the Philippine Jesuit province, said that hungry Filipinos were blocking aid trucks, demanding food to let them pass. He said his organization's relief efforts would involve coordinating to make sure the food arrived safely at its destination. Taking the massive need and the work to meet it into account, Father Gariguez said, "As a church this is part of our ministry ... we are doing this as part of our mission: to help the poor and the vulnerable. So we are really happy to be of help and to contribute whatever we can to ease the life of our people who are really very much burdened by this disaster." Your prayers are needed but you are also urged to make a financial contribution to Catholic Relief Services.

Pope Francis has asked Catholic young people around the world to read, meditate and act on the beatitudes as they celebrate World Youth Day in their dioceses in 2014 and 2015 and as they prepare to join him in Poland in 2016. Taking the text of the beatitudes from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Pope Francis has chosen the themes for World Youth Day celebrations for the next three years, the Vatican announced November 7. World Youth Day is celebrated annually on a local level and every two or three years with an international gathering with the pope. At the end of World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis announced the next international gathering would be held in Krakow, Poland, in 2016. The annual Rome diocesan celebration with the pope is held on Palm Sunday each year; the date of the celebration in other dioceses varies. But don't wait until then. Urge the youth, and for that matter everyone, in your home parish to adopt the beatitudes to guide their daily lives. Living up to the benchmarks that Jesus shared when He was on earth is a difficult task but one worth pursuing. Can you be humble and meek? Do you mourn when others are suffering? Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness? Is your heart pure? Do you seek peace in your community? The accomplishment of having even a small portion of our planet adhere to the beatitudes would make our world a much more blessed place to exist.

The Archbishop of Denver warned that an increasing rejection of God endangers the foundations of democracy, urging Catholics to embrace the truth of the Gospel and to live it “both personally and publicly. When one does away with God, one embraces, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the father of lies and the evil one,” Archbishop Samuel Aquila said in a recent homily. “If there is no truth and if there is no God that is referenced, it means that we, as human beings, are the ones who decide what is good and what is evil,” he added, warning that the complete rejection of God results not in true freedom and justice, but in “dictatorship” and “totalitarianism.” His homily was delivered at the archdiocesan Red Mass, celebrated at Regis University in Denver. The Red Mass is a more than 700-year-old tradition invoking the Holy Spirit's aid for lawyers, judges, and government officials. Archbishop Aquila drew on Christ’s parable from the Gospel of Luke about the prayers of the self-righteous Pharisee and the humble tax collector. He noted that both men recognized the presence of God, but the humble one who recognized “his dependence on God, is the one who is exalted.” The archbishop said that modern society’s rejection of God is a unique challenge. “While the two men who prayed in the parable both recognized God, the great challenge for today, and especially in our own society, are those who want to impose secularism upon us, and radical secularism – a complete denial of God.” He contrasted this with the view of the Founding Fathers, who held that natural rights come from God. The archbishop said the founders’ decision to include the First Amendment’s religion clause was a recognition of the importance of religion. They believed in God and “the free exercise of their faith in the public square. Our democracy is truly based on the natural law and its survival depends upon the recognition of the Creator. There would be no discussion today about the freedom of conscience and religious freedom if everyone acknowledged that truth,” he continued. “Both of those freedoms are greatly challenged today because of the desire to abandon God.” But despite negative trends, Archbishop Aquila said Catholics should be “filled with hope” because of their faith in Christ, and because of the truth of the Gospel. “We as Catholics are called to live our faith in the world; it is not something that is private and solely personal. We are to be witnesses, as our founders were witnesses, to the Creator and to the unalienable rights bestowed by the Creator and to the truths that can be discovered by reason and that certainly are more clearly seen by faith.” He encouraged legal professionals to be “people of prayer” and to take time in prayer before they make decisions. He said judges should take their decision to the Holy Spirit and pray for the gifts of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, fear of the Lord and piety, adding that they should especially seek Christ in the Eucharist. The archbishop then told the congregation to “live your faith in the world.” Citing Pope Francis, he urged them to follow Christ through the renunciation of evil and egoism and through the choice of “good, truth, justice. We are called to recognize that the Lord is the one who stands by us and gives us strength,” he explained. Christians are called to witness as the martyrs did: “not to water down the Gospel, not to water down the faith, not to have a Christianity that is not lived or that is like a little decoration on a cake.” Archbishop Aquila said Catholics are called “in charity and in love to proclaim the God who is love. It is not some soft love, but it is a love that is all demanding and all consuming. It is the love of Christ as revealed in Christ, as lived by St. Thomas More, as lived by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as lived by so many other martyrs who gave witness to their faith as governments rejected faith.”