History is full of tyrants and dictators. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Zedong are among the worst in past history, but today,dictatorship is increasingly on the rise. 
 
True democracy is in retreat as elected officials turn to dictatorship as a way to stay in power and rule with an iron fist and declare they will save their nation from evil and make the nation great. Putin, Erdoğan, Omar Al-Bashir, Kim Jong II are just a few of many that come to mind.
 

Time to humbly open the Church and abandon the paternalism and racism Christendom fosters
 
Part 2. Continued from April 1
 
Father William Grimm MM 
 

Joan Pabona has been a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong for more than four years. She hails from Sudipen in La Union province, the Philippines, and recently won second place in the National Geographic Wheelock Youth Photo Competition 2017.
 
This is one more feather in her cap of awards she has received in the field of photography.
 

Of course, it is almost impossible to get past the ongoing visceral horror of the plight of Myanmar’s ethnic Muslim Rohingya people; over 650,000 of them brutally forced from their homes onto the margins of existence into crowded, inadequate, life-threatening refugee camps.
 

If Jesus were to visit us again, how puzzled he would be with our Christmas. He would be wondering, who is this Santa who seems to be everywhere, a feel-good guy certainly, but wanting us to spend up big.
 
Yet for all the commercialism of this season, for many people around the world, whatever their belief or religion, Christmas is rather a hopeful celebration of good will among peoples and a time for families and friends to gather, often expressing their love and esteem in gift-giving.

In the week before Christmas I always delay buying presents. I find it a difficult time because I am not gifted with the imagination needed to buy truly personal, simple and endearing presents.
 
If I had my way, I would buy everyone a gift voucher, but I appreciate that is hardly the spirit of gift-giving. 
 
Then there is always someone for whom it is difficult to buy, because they don’t seem to need anything.
 

When I was a lad, we had a family bible. There were pages in the back where my mother entered dates of births, baptisms and confirmations. There were pictures. Though it was obviously a book—in fact that’s what the word bible means—I have no recollection that I or anyone else in the family ever read it.
 
We were good Catholics, but bible reading was something Protestants did.