Day Two: Jaffa, Caesarea, Haifa and Nazareth

The first full day of the Catholic Press Association's tour of Israel served as a valuable history lesson of the many peoples who have occupied the land and revealed the diversity among those who live there today.

First stop was Jaffa, an ancient harbor city just south of Tel Aviv. Dating back to at least the fourth century B.C., the city has been under Egyptian rule (see photo at left  of the Ramses Gateway), Roman rule, Byzantine rule and Turkish rule. Statues of Napoleon Bonaparte remind visitors that he sieged the city in 1799.

For Christians, the city holds significance as the home of Simon the Tanner, and the place where St. Peter had his vision of clean and unclean animals to consume (Acts 10:5).

Next up was Caesarea, home to a Roman theater (photo at left), hippodrome, aqueduct and more. Built at the command of Herod the Great, it was the center of Roman culture during the life of Christ.

Haifa, the third-largest city in Israel, is home to one of the loveliest places we've seen on our journey thus far, the Carmelite Stella Maris church and monastery (below). Built on Mount Carmel, altar of the 19th-century church is built above what is said to be the Prophet Elijah's cave.

The city is also the spiritual center of the Baha'i religion and home to the Druze community, which has its roots in Islam.

Our final stop of the day was Nazareth, the highlight of which had to be the Basilica of the Annunciation (below), which is believed to be the home of the Virgin Mary and where the angel visited her to inform her she would bear the Son of God. The original stone structure can be seen on the lower level of the church, along with the remains of a Byzantine church. The upper level is topped by a magnificent dome.

One of our most fascinating encounters of the day was with Ronnie Farj Eid, a Ministry of Tourism official in Nazareth who is an Arab Christian (Nazareth has the largest Arab population in Israel). Eid, who lives in a small village near the Sea of Galilee, spoke of what it is like to be a Christian in the Middle East and expressed his fears that in the next 100 to 200 years, there would be no Christians to fill the churches in the region. Many of us have heard about the dwindling numbers of Christians in the Holy Land, but it can seem like such an academic topic. Hearing a fellow Catholic's story made the problem very real to me.

Saturday we will visit Mount Tabor and the Sea of Galilee, including a planned boat ride. I'll share our adventures on OSV Daily Take, and you can also follow my updates at @shayesOSV.

Day One: Arrival in Tel Aviv

My fellow Catholic journalists and I have come to Israel see ancient biblical sites, but upon our arrival, we were first treated to the very contemporary, bustling city of Tel Aviv, the commercial capital and most populous city in the country.

By the time we arrived at 5:15 p.m Israel time and gathered our belongings, the sun had already gone down, but we were able to get a taste of Tel Aviv nightlife (our tour guide, Nathan, pointed out a famous Israeli singer who was dining at a table near us at the trendy Meatos Restaurant) and catch glimpses of the Bauhaus style of architecture for which the city is famous.

It should be a fascinating contrast to the city that's first on Friday's agenda. Jaffa (Joppa) sits next to Tel Aviv along the Mediterranean sea, but while Tel Aviv is just over a century old, Jaffa is an ancient Port city. It is known, among other things, as the location where St. Peter restored the disciple Tabitha to life. We will also be visiting Caesarea and Haifa before heading to Nazareth.

I will be sharing all of our adventures daily here at OSV Daily Take, and you can also follow me on Twitter: shayes@OSV.

Come along on a Holy Land journey

By Sarah Hayes

In November 2010, Pope Benedict XVI had these words to say while visiting Santiago de Compostela: “To go on pilgrimage really means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where he has revealed himself, where his grace has shone with particular splendour and produced rich fruits of conversion and holiness among those who believe. Above all, Christians go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the places associated with the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection.”

Going on a pilgrimage has long been appealing to me. But a Holy Land journey seemed out of reach. Then came an opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up — the CPA Holy Land Tour, sponsored by the Israel Ministry of Tourism for Catholic Press Association journalists.

Beginning Thursday through Feb. 2, I will be among a dozen Catholic journalists visiting biblical sites in Israel. Among the planned visits will be Mount Carmel, Mount of the Beatitudes, the Sea of Galilee, Mount Tabor and its Church of the Transfiguration, Cana, the Dead Sea and Jerusalem’s Old City, including the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

To be able to "encounter God" by following in the very footsteps of Our Lord and Savior is almost beyond comprehension to me. Such an opportunity is exciting — and very humbling. I ask you for your prayers on this incredible journey, and I invite you to come along with me. Each day, I will be blogging at OSV Daily Take about my experiences, and I will be tweeting pictures and thoughts as well at @shayesOSV. Shalom.

Sarah Hayes is OSV presentation editor.

The March for Life photos you probably haven't seen

By Mary DeTurris Poust
(Photos by Matt K Cassens)

If your local newspapers are anything like mine, you probably didn't see more than two inches of copy devoted to the annual March for Life and the thousands of people who walked in the rain to stand up for the unborn.

The secular world doesn't like to focus on that story. There were even some Catholics -- visible bloggers -- out there yesterday pontificating about why they don't support the march, about the lack of "diversity," and the self-important attitudes of the marchers, so I thought I'd share some awesome photos by Matt K Cassens of St. Blogustine that show the reality of it all, the stuff you won't see in any secular newspaper.

People don't go on the March for Life to feel good about themselves; they go because they have convictions, because they believe in the dignity of human life for even the most vulnerable, because they take their duty as Christians seriously. They walk in the rain and the cold. They ride for hours and hours on cramped buses. They get nasty things shouted at them and written about them -- even by fellow Catholics.

But those of us who did not get to the march appreciate their efforts and applaud them for their willingness to put themselves out there. Here are a few photos to give you a glimpse if you weren't there in person, but be sure to go to Matt's blog and view the rest.


Click HERE for more March for Life photos by Matt K Cassens.

Shaw: Ways to revive the struggling institution of marriage

By Russell Shaw

I was chatting with a priest who is a judge with the marriage tribunal of his large Eastern diocese when he shared an interesting tidbit of information. In his diocese and the other dioceses of his state, the number of requests for marriage annulments has lately fallen by 10 percent.

Good news? Fewer marriages on the rocks? Not really, he explained. “People are getting married later, some don’t bother to marry at all, others marry outside the Church, and others don’t come to the tribunal when their marriages break down.”

“Then,” I hazarded, “this 10 percent drop is just a new phase in the same old set of problems?” The tribunal judge nodded — that was the size of it.

All of which is confirmation that the Catholic sector of the crisis of American marriage is going strong. The most telling statistic may be the sharp drop-off in the sheer number of Catholic marriages. Back in 1990, with the Catholic population at 55 million, there were 334,000 of them; in 2010, when Catholics numbered 68.5 million, marriages had fallen by nearly half to around 179,000.

If it’s any consolation, what has been happening to Catholic marriage reflects developments in American marriage. Marriages in this country dropped from 2.44 million in 1990 to 2.08 million in 2009, even as the population of the United States was rising 60 million. A Pew Research Center study says that just 51 percent of American adults are married now. (The figure in 2000 was 57 percent.)

Many factors combine to account for the decline of marriage — from economic pressures to the campaign to recognize homosexual relationships as marriages, which undermines the unique status of traditional marriage understood to be a relationship between a man and a woman — and only that.

Among Catholics, poor religious formation — or none — very often has a central role. Undoubtedly, too, divorce plays a key part, especially no-fault divorce, which Michael McManus says should be called “unilateral divorce.” There have been more than a million divorces yearly in the United States since 1975, and very many of these were of the no-fault variety.

Significant in this context is the huge increase in cohabitation — 523,000 cohabiting couples in the United States in 1970 and 7.5 million in 2010. McManus, a non-Catholic journalist who is founder of a group called Marriage Savers, says the rise is driven partly by “understandable fear of divorce” among couples who anticipate fewer hassles ahead if they don’t bother marrying at all.

The social costs of divorce are well established, and to a great extent it’s the children of divorced couples who are paying them. Kids from non-intact families are three times as likely as other kids to be expelled from school or become teenage out-of-wedlock parents, six times as likely to live in poverty, 12 times as likely to land in jail.

Various solutions have been proposed to the no-fault plague, among them legislation called the Second Chances Act. It provides a one-year waiting period before divorce along with education in reconciliation as an option. Sponsors William J. Doherty, a University of Minnesota scholar, and Leah Ward Sears, former chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, cite studies showing that among 40 percent of divorcing couples, at least one spouse is open to reconciliation.

McManus scoffs at the cliché “you can’t legislate morality.” He writes: “Nonsense. For 40 years public policy has been legislating immorality by favoring divorce and cohabitation over marriage, and the consequences have been devastating. ... The timeless institution of marriage can be revived.”

It’s sure worth a try.