Pontifical University
of the Holy Cross
Foundation

ASIA

Naveen Joemon Kondaparla Vijaya Raju
Author: Gerardo Ferrara,  November 2023

Meet Naveen, a young seminarian in the Archdiocese of Changanacherry, part of the Syro-Malabar Eastern Rite Catholic community in Kerala, India. He's 29 years old, hailing from a region where Christians are a minority among the predominantly Hindu population. Naveen's passion for becoming a priest ignited at an early age. As an altar boy and leader in his parish's Child Group Associate, he was deeply involved in his faith.

However, Naveen observed a shift in the practice of their faith in recent years due to governmental changes that favored Hinduism and the rise of religious fundamentalism in India. He aspires to use his theological knowledge and education to educate more people about Catholicism in his homeland, where many have limited knowledge about the faith, including the identity of the Pope.

Naveen holds degrees in English Literature, Philosophy, and English Literature, demonstrating his commitment to learning. He also aims to leverage social media as a platform for spreading the faith to a wider audience, recognizing its vast potential. The Formation Foundation generously supports his academic journey, a gesture he greatly appreciates.

However, one pivotal incident played a significant role in cementing Naveen's dedication to serving God and his community: a life-altering accident at the age of 14. Here's Naveen's account of that day:

Read More

AFRICA

Fr. Anselme Ludiga
Author: Meghan Allen,  4 July 2022

Fr. Anselme Ludiga, a priest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, knew at just seven years old that he wanted to serve others as a priest one day. “I remember, before we had a television in our home, my father telling us stories and asking each of us what we wanted to do with our lives. I answered, ‘I am going to be a priest’ at just seven years old! That calling has never left me, all these years later.” What Fr. Anselme didn’t know at the time is where this path of priesthood would take him and whose lives he would have the possibility to save both on earth and in the afterlife. The eldest of five children, he grew up in a tight-knit Catholic home that knew hard work and communal support was the only way to having a peaceful, thriving household and community. This foundation would come to serve him well as he pursued his dream of becoming a priest.

Read More

EUROPE

 

Read More

NORTH AMERICA

Fr. George Elliott
Author: Meghan Allen,  24 May 2022

Each one of us is born with a God-given vocational call. While those who take up the vocation of priesthood are few, without them, our communities would not be able to connect with God in the Eucharist. That’s why it is imperative that we as a church support the education and formation of our priests.

Fr. George Elliott of Nacogdoches, Texas is a juggernaut in his diocese. As is the case with many of us faithful, Fr. George grew up daydreaming in church pews. But at 15, when he lost his cousin suddenly, he began to take a second look at how he lived his life and where God stood in his list of priorities. After graduation, he enrolled in the Air Force Academy. He recalls those first six weeks of training being spent in prayer, whether in his moments of physical suffering or silence while standing at attention. His time in prayer eventually provided clear direction: he would spend his life serving God and His people as a priest.

Read More

ASIA

Fr. An
Author: Meghan Allen,  10 May 2022
 
The Catholic Church has been struggling for centuries to survive in Vietnam, with many Catholics having been executed, imprisoned, or otherwise treated harshly by the government. In reading this priest’s story, we hope to offer you a clearer picture of what our faithful brothers and sisters on the other side of the world struggle with and the dangers of practicing the Christian faith in a communist country. The name of the priest has been changed, along with dates and places, to protect his identity and ensure no backlash for speaking candidly about his struggle to become a priest in Vietnam.

Read More

NORTH AMERICA

Sam Kuttappassery
Author: Meghan Allen,  21 March 2022
 
Sam Kuttappassery’s call to the priesthood has anchored him in his faith since he was a child. “It was more than just a gut feeling—it was a conviction.” The young seminarian from Paterson, New Jersey looks back on his initial call to the priesthood as providential. From the moment he began to engage with God on a personal level at sixteen, he felt this as certain fate—never doubting that God’s plan for him to be a shepherd of the Church would deeply fulfill him in a way no other career he could have chosen for himself would have. Through his collegiate years at Rutgers, he recalls periods of feeling far from his faith. However, all the while he had no doubt that he would enter the seminary after graduation. He reflects on those years as a testament to his vocational calling: “The further I went away from God, the more he called me closer to Him. It just goes to show that God’s voice is eternal.” At Mundelein Seminary in Chicago, Sam completed a master’s degree in philosophy, and after a pastoral year, was given the opportunity by his bishop to move to Rome to continue his academic journey.

Read More

EUROPE

Fr. Petr Havlik
Author: Meghan Allen,  6 March 2022
 
What does the once-vibrant Church of a former Soviet bloc country look like today? Fr. Petr Havlik sketches an unsettling picture of a Church that endured a decades-long repression of the former Czechoslovakian communist regime, now the Czech Republic. The once-76-percent Catholic population (in 1950) of former Czechoslovakia today is a meager 10 percent, a soberly heart-breaking statistic when you consider that 44 percent of the Czech population asserts it has no faith at all.

The 33-year-old doctoral student at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross recalls the countless testimonies of priests who offered Mass in secret during these years of Christian persecution… During the day, some were window-washers , others disguised themselves as married men. This is the world into which Fr. Petr was born. His own grandfather had been imprisoned for being discovered as a practicing Catholic, but this did not keep him from exemplifying Catholic values and raising his family with a deep faith in Jesus.

Read More

MIDDLE EAST

FROM RUBBLE TO ROME
Fr. Aram Pano
Author: Meghan Allen,  11 May 2021

It was in the midst of missiles flying overhead that Fr. Aram Pano first learned to say Mass. His bishop had offered his family shelter when the tensions finally broke between the U.S. and Iraq, and his family’s city of Basra was targeted by a US-British military coalition. Fr. Aram, at the time, hadn’t even considered becoming a priest. In fact, he was attending technical school in hopes of becoming an electrician – a job very much needed in a city that had intermittent power outages daily. In 1992, about ten years prior to his call to the priesthood that night of the airstrike, Fr. Aram, a Syriac native speaker and Chaldean priest, was hurled into the Arabic-speaking world at just six years old. The Pano family had moved from a small Christian village in the north of Iraq to the southern city of Basra in search of job opportunities, as many other Christian families had done, following the war between Iraq and Kuwait. Looking for stability, his family was met, instead, with a number of challenges in their new city: in addition to power outages, Fr. Aram's family discovered saltwater ran from the sinks, the city’s sanitation systems were lacking, and a language barrier would prove difficult to overcome.

Read More

AFRICA

A MIRACULOUS BIRTH, A GIFT BACK TO GOD
Fr. Melchizedek Okpala
Author: Colin Howell,  6 April 2020

Nigeria is divided by widely diverse ethnic groups and polarized by religious beliefs. Because of significant aggressive and often lethal hostility towards Christians, perpetrated by Islamic extremists in the northern region by groups like Boko Haram or the Fulani Herdsmen, Nigeria consistently ranks near the top ten countries in the world for Christian persecution. This persecution is visited on the sizeable 80 million Christian population through unspeakable physical violence and the destruction of Christian churches, but it is also subtly and consistently applied through politics. The disenfranchisement of Christians often forces them to flee their lands, leaving everything behind, as well as the government takeover of Christian schools and the forced infiltration of catholic schools with Muslim staff members, facilitating the internal erosion of catholic morals, all of which are but a few of many cases.

Read More

ASIA

A CONTINENT IN NEED OF CHRIST
Duy Khoa Pham
Author: Colin Howell,  6 April 2020

Today most of us Americans know of the many challenges that the Church in China faces, hearing rumors and whispers of the incessant persecution to which the underground Church is now well accustomed. But few of us could speak with much authority on one of China’s southern neighbors: Vietnam.

In fact, beyond knowing that we were in a long, drawn-out and terrible conflict with Vietnam from 1955 until 1975, many of us might even have difficulty pointing out this South Asian country on a globe. And even fewer would likely know that Saigon is now known by the name Ho Chi Minh City, the largest city in Vietnam with approximately 13 million residents in the greater metropolitan area, exceeding that of American cities like Chicago by several million.

The lack of knowledge is actually quite reasonable because after the withdrawal of US troops in 1975, North Vietnam took over the rest of the country and established a unitary socialist government in 1976, politically and economically isolating the country from the rest of the world for ten years. Finally, in 1986 the government instituted a number of economic and political reforms that drove Vietnamese integration into the political and economic global arena. Now Vietnam is consistently ranked among the fastest growing economies in the world and this fact, together with a number of other mitigating factors, makes Vietnam of great interest for all Catholics worldwide.

Read More

SOUTH AMERICA

A LIFE LIVED FOR CHRIST, A LIFE WELL SPENT
Fr. Pedro Correa
Author: Colin Howell,  5 April 2020

For many years in America we heard of nothing good coming from Colombia. It was always about guerillas or cartel wars so violent it earned them the title “most dangerous country in the world,” a title they held for some time.

But while the stigma still stubbornly persists, the truth is an ocean apart, or rather, a Gulf apart. A flight over the Gulf of Mexico unveils a country that scarcely resembles itself from just 15 years ago. Cucúta, Colombia, while on the border with neighboring—and intensely struggling—Venezuela, still managed to drop from 48th to 50th most dangerous city in the world, positioned now even much better than US cities like New Orleans, Detroit and Baltimore. And in another year or so it may drop off the list entirely.

Now the once-labeled most dangerous city in the world, Bogota, the country’s capital, has become a tourist hotbed and is famous for myriad reasons, not the least of which is the kind openness of the locals, with their welcoming warm smiles and inviting culture.

If one follows the news and attempts to understand how a country could turn around so quickly, one would certainly come across all manner of literature about policies and governmental intervention. And while this certainly is part of the reason, there is a far more powerful reason that almost always goes unspoken, and is more than likely the reason behind those welcoming warm smiles.

Read More

NORTH AMERICA

A MOST RELEVANT TIME FOR RELEVANT RADIO
Fr. Francis "Rocky" Hoffman
Author: Colin Howell,  5 April 2020

It would be hard to find many Catholics in America today who don’t know the name Father Francis “Rocky” Hoffman. He is known for many great reasons but probably most notably for his role as CEO and Executive Director of Relevant Radio, the now massive, evangelistic Catholic radio ministry.

Such a simple mission conceptually: to reach out and evangelize people that are stuck every single day in their cars in traffic. The effectiveness of this ministry is hard to quantify. But if numbers tell us anything they show—under Father Rocky’s leadership and strong passion to bring the gospel message into the traffic jams of America—that Relevant Radio has grown into 171 AM/FM stations reaching a potential audience of 220 million people across the country and even more around the globe through their downloadable app.

It would be hard to argue that priests like Father Rocky don’t take their call to evangelization seriously. Obviously, to faithfully serve as the CEO, his daily life in many respects mirrors that of any successful business executive with frequent travel across the country, public speaking, fundraising, and relationship building, all to serve this highly effective apostolate, “to bring Christ to the world through the media.”

Read More

MIDDLE EAST

SERVING CHRIST ON THE FRONT LINES
Fr. Qusay Ajim
Author: Colin Howell,  5 April 2020

ISIS may not be in America, but we all were affected by the destruction they caused. As Catholics we cannot help but feel the horrendous sting of the many thousands of murdered Christians. Imagine living in daily fear for yourself and your family, knowing you could all be slaughtered at any moment for the simple fact of being a Christian.

Fr. Ajim, a Catholic priest from the Christian city of Mosul, knows first-hand how terrible these attacks were for Iraqi Christians and how difficult the situation continues to be even after ISIS was driven out of northern Iraq. Tombs and places of worship were desecrated and destroyed. Homes belonging to Christians were often marked in red paint with the letter “N” for “Nazarat” (which means Christian), and their property stolen when families fled their homes, walking for miles to reach Christian cities where they would be safe.

Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the capital of the province of Nineveh, experienced religious genocide that cries out for justice and for support from the international community and particularly from Christians. Standing in solidarity with Fr. Ajim and other students of our partner institution from countries under attack by anti-Christian forces is very important. They will be the strong leaders these countries desperately need to support their people and strengthen their faith.

Read More