‘We’re saying the Church is here’

“I spend almost all my time visiting patients. We do not sit and wait for referrals to come to us. We go and see patients. We, ideally, see everybody.”

Father Bob Jones, a chaplain at Los Angeles Ccounty-USC Medical Center the last 17 years — back when one of the busiest public hospitals in the western United States was located in a historic art deco facility on State Street — has his black bag packed and ready to go. It’s stuffed with bottles of holy water, prayer books and holy cards to give away along with a translation of some Zapotec words spoken in the southwestern-central highlands of Mexico and info sheets about what St. Camillus Center for Pastoral Care has to offer.

Vocational formation and the new evangelization: Ongoing discernment

The 35-year old lawyer asks himself, “Do I leave the job that I love, sell my condo, and give up the life that I have been living to enter the Seminary? After all, I have been thinking about the priesthood since grade school.”

The 21-year old college student at the local state university has been volunteering on the weekends with a group of religious sisters visiting the sick, the elderly and the homebound. Although she has been excited about a career as an accountant, she is now wondering if God is calling her to be a religious sister serving the poor and the sick.

Local Korean Catholics welcome papal visit to Korea

Pope Francis’ visit to South Korea — his first trip to Asia and the first papal visit to the country in 25 years — was received positively by Los Angeles’ Korean Catholic community.

During his trip, the pope beatified 124 Korean martyrs, helped celebrate Asian Youth Day for young Catholics, and even conducted an impromptu baptism for the father of a deceased victim of last April’s Sewol ferry tragedy, which killed 300 people.

Middle East crisis: ‘We are still on the brink of extinction’

A day after U.S. warplanes dropped a barrage of bombs to help Iraqi and Kurdish ground troops take back Iraq’s largest dam near Mosul, some 500 Assyrian Christian supporters marched on Los Angeles’ busiest streets and freeway overpasses — from Union Station to City Hall — shouting “Stop ISIS Now!” while waving the white, blue and red Assyrian flag.

Immigrant youth: ‘The real question is what happens now’

It was just after lunchtime at the temporary housing shelter at the Port Hueneme Naval Base, and the Central American migrant teenagers coming inside from their tented dining room on the way to afternoon activities smiled and waved as they passed by the archdiocesan visitors.

Last of the old, first of the new’: Archdiocesan Golden Jubilarians for 2014

“Supported only by the weapons of truth and charity, we intend to pursue the dialogue that has begun and to advance, as much as it will be in our power, the work that has been undertaken.”

Not long after he succeeded Pope John XXIII in 1963, Pope Paul VI issued this statement to verify that the work of the Second Vatican Council started by John in 1962 would continue. Indeed, in 1964 the third session was held with three documents issued on Nov. 21: Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Orientalium Ecclesiarum (the Decree on the Catholic Churches of the Eastern Rite), and Unitatis Redintegratio (the Decree on Ecumenism).

C3 keynote: Evangelizing and ministering in the digital age

Spreading the Gospel — especially for Christians in the last century — often meant traveling to foreign lands, meeting the people, learning the language and then putting into those words (and maybe images) the message of the church.

That chain of events is identical for church leaders today who are looking to bring the message of Jesus to the masses in this highly sophisticated, and often overwhelming, digital age.

‘This is not war. This is genocide’

“There’s just a lot of killing — a lot of killing of innocent Christians,” Donna Panoussi, 43, was saying after the only Sunday Mass at St. Paul Chaldean and Assyrian Catholic Church in North Hollywood. Many of the congregants filing out still had family and friends in Iraq.

Her mother, Rosa Bouganian, 67, pointed out how she was half Armenian, on her father’s side, and half Assyrian. “They’re killing everybody, kids and adults.” she said.

Evangelizing online forum kicks off C3 conference at LMU

The great evangelists Sts. Peter and Paul took full advantage of the network of Roman Empire roads to spread of Good News of Jesus Christ throughout the then-known world. Today’s evangelists must do likewise with the Internet and social media, the director of the Los Angeles Archdiocese’s Office of New Evangelization stressed during opening remarks at the Digital Church Conference this week at Loyola Marymount University.

Lives of service: Jesuit jubilarians in Los Angeles

Retired Bishop Gordon Bennett is among a number of Jesuit priests who are celebrating milestone anniversaries of religious life in 2014. The following Jesuits all have connections in service to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.