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A Gay Fashion Designer for the Pope, World Peace, and Inadvertent Fasting
This Catholic woman wasn’t planning on fasting when, via modern carrier pigeon, I read an email forward from the pope to the faithful. But in one fell swoop, a summer cold coincidentally took me down. So, I inadvertently wound up fasting on the very day our new pope called us to.
What any refugee or mass shooting survivor wouldn’t give for a burn-through-in-a-week common cold to be their most present obstacle.
“While our world continues to be wounded by wars in the Holy Land, in Ukraine and in many other regions of the world, I ask all the faithful to spend Aug. 22 in fasting and prayer, asking the Lord to grant us peace and justice and to dry the tears of those who suffer because of the armed conflicts underway,” Pope Leo XIV called Catholics around the world to be in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are fighting injustice, war, starvation, persecution, and displacement.¹
Pope Leo XIV did not specify the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, or other “regions of the world” by name, but he specified armed conflicts. So what can the average person do to prevent and end danger and violence? How can any one person possibly make a difference?
“There is hope. We still have to work hard, pray hard and seek the way forward,” the…
