St. Mark, the Evangelist

Feast date: Apr 25

St. Mark, the Evangelist, is the author of the second Gospel and the patron saint of notaries. He wrote the Gospel in Greek for the Gentile converts to Christianity. Tradition says the Romans asked St. Mark to record the teachings of St. Peter about Jesus. St. Mark is often depicted as a winged lion in religious art.

St. Mark is also said to have traveled with St. Paul and St. Barnabas, who was Mark's cousin, on their missionary journey through Cyprus. Mark is said to have founded the Church in Alexandria.

St. Mark is sometimes called John Mark in the New Testament. Both he and his mother, Mary, were highly esteemed in the early Church, and his mother's house in Jerusalem served as a meeting place for Christians.

A Catholic Charities caseworker was sentenced to three years in prison after she falsely stated, at least 11 times, that she had made required monthly visits to the home. Catholic Charities will pay least $960,000 in damages to the boy’s estate.

In Ontario, Catholic school board members are not appointed by bishops, but are elected during municipal elections.

Bolaños stated that he expected the Church in Spain to finance most of the fund; the bishops’ conference countered that “it could not accept a plan that excluded victims of sexual abuse in other organizations,” Reuters reported.

Extrapolating from a survey of 8,000 people, a parliamentary commission announced in October that an estimated 230,000 Spaniards (0.6% of the population) had been abused by priests and that an additional estimated 210,000 (0.5%) had been abused by laity in Catholic institutions.

In December, an audit commissioned by the Spanish bishops, and conducted by a law firm, found that a far smaller number—at least 2,056 minors, most of them male—were abused by Spanish clergy.

A brief statement released by the Vatican after the meeting said that the conversation had touched on Church-state relations and international security, particularly in the region of western Africa.

At his April 24 general audience, held in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis reflected on the life of grace according to the Spirit, in the latest talk in a series of Wednesday general audiences devoted to the virtues and vices.

The commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the attacks—including a moment of silence and a procession from one targeted church to the other—“was a moment of great spiritual intensity for the Catholic community of Sri Lanka,” said Father Jude Chrysantha Fernando, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Colombo. “The memory of these heroes of the faith is alive and a source of inspiration for many.”

The teenager who was arrested after the assault on Mar Mari Emmanuel was a part of the group, which was organized around a “religiously motivated, violent extremist ideology,” a spokesman for prosecutors said. Police said that the arrests were made to keep the community safe from further attacks.

Officials did not identify those arrested because they are minors. Nor did they identify the religion with which the teenagers were allied. But witnesses have reported that the teen who attacked Mar Mari Emmanuel shouted about insults to the prophet Mohammed.

Australian courts have banned social-media platforms in Australia from showing videos of the violent attack on the Assyrian Orthodox prelate. X (formerly Twitter) has announced that it will challenge the ban.

“Inaccuracies (now corrected) had crept in during the transition from the original version of the interview (in Italian) to translations into other languages, leaving room for misinterpretations,” Fides reported. “We therefore apologize to the Cardinal himself and to all those who may have been perplexed or embittered by the content and catchphrases used in the reactions to the article.”

The Capuchin Franciscan cardinal is the sole African member of the Pope’s nine-member advisory Council of Cardinals.

The Pope of “martyred Ukraine” and of Gaza that “suffers so much.” He offered a prayer for peace in the Holy Land, “that they may be two states, free and with good relations.”