In addition to this message, Pope Francis used Twitter in the days following its release to focus more attention on nonviolence.

On 3 January he tweeted: "May nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions."

The next day he tweeted: "To be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence," and he reiterated this message on 5 January, tweeting: "May charity and nonviolence govern how we treat one another."

His message and his tweets came after a conference on nonviolence took place at the Vatican in April, organized jointly by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International, at which the participants called on the pope to write an encyclical or "other teaching document" on nonviolence and to reject the just war tradition. It is likely that Pope Francis's World Day of Peace message was, in part, a response to this conference's appeal.

Pope Francis's message was not the first time a pope exhorted Catholics to nonviolence. Pope St. John Paul II forcefully opposed violence and praised those who opposed injustice nonviolently. And at the Angelus on 18 February 2007, Pope Benedict XVI referred to Jesus's exhortation to "Love your enemies" (Luke 6:27) as "the magna carta of Christian non-violence" and spoke about nonviolence as:

"not merely tactical behaviour but a person's way of being, the attitude of one who is so convinced of God's love and power that he is not afraid to tackle evil with the weapons of love and truth alone."

That said, Pope Francis's World Day of Peace message is the first papal document focused specifically on nonviolence, and draws attention to it in a more sustained manner than previous papal documents. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics article by Gregory K Hillis, Associate Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University.
• Image: Patheos

"If the you of five years ago doesn't consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually."

It's a great sentiment, but my malarkey radar went off at the attribution to Merton.

This language of "growing spiritually" is awfully modern for someone who died half a century ago and dedicated his adult life to a religious tradition that he believed contained, at its foundations, an unchanging truth.

And, sure enough, it's not from Merton. People who have searched through his actual writings haven't been able to find it.

My own (admittedly lazier) search using Google Books also turned up nothing authentic.

There are plenty more where this came from: quotes that have circulated ad infinitum on social media but can't be traced to the famous religious figure who allegedly said them. Here are some popular ones.

The Prayer of St. Francis?

I was crushed to find out the famous prayer "Lord make me an instrument of your peace," is not actually from St. Francis.

This is one of the only prayers I have memorized — thank you, Sarah McLachlan and Buffy — and it was read at my wedding. I love this prayer.

But it's an early-20th-century French prayer that somehow got stuck on the back of an image of St. Francis, and much like a modern-day meme tends to forever cement a connection between words and pictures, the association was born.

By World War II, people were calling it the Prayer of St. Francis, and we've never looked back.

"Be the change"
Since I used this quote in at least two speeches before I found out that Mahatma Gandhi never said it, I'm now officially part of the problem. I'm wicked sorry. Continue reading

• Jana Reiss is a senior columnist at Religion News Service where the above article was first published.

Like Pope Francis, Merton engaged in interfaith dialogue. What these three men have in common, however, is that their works reveal them to be visionaries and mystics with a faith message for the world, a message that does not shy away from naming and engaging with the darkness around us.

Graham Greene led an eclectic life, and embraced and dialogued with the complex world around him. After his conversion to Catholicism in the 1920s, he was commissioned to go to Mexico to report on religious persecution there which resulted in him writing one of his famous novels, The Power and the Glory.

He was adept at characterising the flawed broken priest or individual who could still bring Christ to others, despite his brokenness. The internal struggle of the soul to find and receive grace was amongst the issues that consumed him.

As he so well depicted in another work, The Heart of the Matter, he understood the paradox of how a person's conscience and love of God, could also lead them to disaster.

Greene confronted and explored the world of international politics, espionage and the world of corruption, (he worked for MI6 at one stage). He took a stand on moral issues - he allegedly quit the American Academy of Arts and Letters over America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

A serial adulterer and womaniser, he explored flawed and complex interpersonal relationships in his writing, such as in his famous work, The End of the Affair. He was by his own admission, a man who struggled with his own sins whilst balancing a passionate faith.

Able to deepen and challenge his own religious and spiritual beliefs amidst a rich and tumultuous life, his flawed and complex nature both informed his writing, and furthered his faith as a devout Catholic. Continue reading

• Joanna Thyer is a writer, Sydney hospital chaplain, and educator. Her most recent work is 12 Steps to Spiritual Freedom, (Loyola Press, 2014).
• This article, from The Good Oil, the e-magazine of the Good Samaritan Sisters, is used with permission.

Then I learned that even saints had massive doubts about God.

How reassuring.

If even the holiest of the holy had second thoughts, why not me?

Maybe we Catholics should talk more about doubt.

It actually is an intrinsic part of the pilgrimage, a Jesuit friend priest told me, common at the beginning and throughout the spiritual journey.

Then he told me to read none other than former Pope Benedict XVI on doubt.

Indeed, the first chapter of Joseph Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity" is all about doubt vs. belief.

"The believer is always threatened with an uncertainty that in moments of temptation can suddenly and unexpectedly cast a piercing light on the fragility of the whole," he writes.

Suddenly the believer is not just questioning the literalness of biblical stories — whether, say, Christ really walked on water — but facing "the bottomless abyss of nothingness."

And the abyss is lurking everywhere, it turns out.

Saint Therese of Lisieux, a 19th-century French Carmelite nun, wrote about her own terrible crisis of faith at the end of her life, at a mere 24.

The nuns she lived with were so horrified they edited her writings to remove mentions of the "temptations of atheism."

Spiritual genius Thomas Merton, the famed Catholic monk, said in "New Seeds of Contemplation," "Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt . . . for every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial doubt."

Some of the best-known Catholics novelists of the 20th century — Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Mary Gordon — created characters that swing wildly between faith and doubt.

A recurring theme: Faith is so hard to maintain in a brutal, unjust world; doubt comes easily.

Most famously and recently, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose letters were released in 2007, expressed doubt and despair about God.

Her "dark night" lasted almost 50 years, with rare reprieves, up until her death in 1997. Continue reading

Source

• Margery Eagen in Crux

Margery Eagan is a writer and commentator on current affairs.