Joseph Masilamany

Modern life often asks us to divide ourselves neatly: work here, family there, faith somewhere in the margins. Yet lived experience tells a different story. Life does not come in compartments. It arrives tangled — work shaping family life, family shaping belief, belief shaping how one survives the demands of work.

Harvest festivals are older than temples and churches. Long before theology was articulated and liturgy formalised, human beings learned to look at the soil, the rain and the grain and to recognise a simple truth: life is received, not manufactured.

St Agnes of Rome was barely a teenager when she was killed for her faith. Born around AD 291 and martyred during the Diocletian persecution in AD 304, she was only about 12 or 13 years old.

Peace, in this vision, is not something imposed from above or enforced through strength. It begins in vulnerability. God enters history not as a ruler but as a child, dependent on a mother’s care.

From cathedrals to parish churches across the country, the nine Catholic dioceses in Malaysia marked the close of the Jubilee Year 2025 on Sunday, December 28, through solemn Masses and thanksgiving celebrations.

Brothers Gabriel, Michael, Anthony, Peter, and Francis, each carrying a different temperament, a different way of being “Christmas-ly” present are no more.

Juan Diego’s reaction reveals his heart. “I am a nobody,” he told her. “Choose someone important, respected.”

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, celebrated each year on December 8, now speaks to me not of perfection, but of preparation, how God readies hearts long before miracles unfold.

Crisis must be understood not merely as danger but as a doorway through which the Church can grow, Archbishop Simon Poh of Kuching said, urging Asian Catholics to confront modern challenges with confidence and hope.

When Cardinal Sebastian Francis spoke, his words carried both warning and blessing. “We need children,” he said, “otherwise there is no future.”