Burkina Faso’s leader conducts a partial restructuring of his cabinet

 

The head of Burkina Faso’s military junta, Ibrahim Traoré, on Sunday carried out a partial restructuring of his cabinet, including the Foreign and Mines Ministers, after his government revised the mining code following  the fall in gold production.

Traore has appointed Yacouba Zabré Gouba in the portfolio of Minas, which replaces Simon Pierre Busim; while Karamoko Jean Marie Traore -so far in Reginal Cooperation- replaces Olivia Rouamba in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to decrees collected by the burkiniese news agency AIB.

The move comes as the country’s gold production, one of Africa’s largest producers, fell 13 percent in 2022, so at least five mines have closed amid deteriorating security conditions reports the Bloomberg news agency.

In addition, Mathias Traoré will be the secretary general of the government, since the one who was in this position so far, Jacques Sosthéne Dingara, moves to National Education. The Minister of Communication and Tourism, Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo, has become Minister of State. Stella Kabré will occupy Regional Cooperation.

Burkina Faso, ruled by a military junta since the January 2022 coup against then-president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, has experienced an increase in insecurity since 2015. The board is now headed by Ibrahim Traoré, who starred in September 2022 in a raid that was considered a ‘learfriend coup’ against the until then leader, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

Climate summit reaches transition agreement to “abandon” fossil fuels

 

The countries meeting at the climate summit reached a “transition agreement to abandon all fossil fuels” early this Wednesday, as announced by the COP 28 presidency through its profile on the social network which has highlighted the “consensus to generate a paradigm shift” that has the “potential to redefine the economy”.

The text of the COP28 declaration was published by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) conference presidency and adopted in plenary a few hours later. The 21-page document urges countries to abandon fossil fuels in their energy systems. However, it does not require a specific elimination of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, according to Dpa.

COP 28 President Sultan al Jaber has referred to the agreement as a “historic package”. “Future generations may not know your names, but they will owe each of you a debt of gratitude”, Al Jaber said

Ten people, including eight students, were kille in an attack on separatist in western Cameroon

 At least 10 peopled, including eight students, were kidnapped on Tuesday by suspected separatist militiamen in the Northwest Region, on of Cameroon’s two English-speaking majorities, in a conflict since 2011.

The perfect of the department of Menchum, Abdoullahi Aliou, has indicated in statement that “armed terrorists” attacked an institute in Esu, where they “nevade the students, tortured them and set them of fire two classroom” before fleeing the site with two workers at the center and eight students.

Ten people, including eight students, were killed in an attack on separatists in western Cameroon
At least 10 people, including eight high school students, were kidnapped on Tuesday by suspected separatist militiamen in the Northwest Region, one of Cameroon's two English-speaking majorities, in a conflict since 2017.

The Spanish guru who left Silicon Valley to become a “servant of God” as an Augustinian nun

 

Montserrat Medina left her successful career as a Deloitte executive to “invest in her future for eternal life”

 

“I don’t know the reason why the Lord has noticed me. The only thing I know for sure is that I have found ‘the treasure’”. This is how Montserrat Medina (Valencia, 37 years old) said goodbye on her LinkedIn account a year ago from her successful life in the Olympus of technology -Silicon Valley- to enroll in a new project, not business, but spiritual: becoming a “servant of God” as a contemplative nun in the Augustinian Order.

She left everything “with great regret” to “heed God’s call to follow him more closely”. While he delayed the true answer, “that which compromises life”, he used all his talents that “the infinite goodness of the Lord” granted him to “accumulate riches in this world”. Among them, being awarded a scholarship for a doctorate in mathematical and computational engineering at the prestigious Stanford University (USA) or being part of the renowned Deloitte audit in its area of Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

After a journey between ‘briefings’ and ‘Big Date’, he now dedicates his time to preparing pasta, sweet potato sweets and praying in silence at the Monastery of Santa Ana, located in the Castellon town of Sant Mateu. A temple focused on the contemplative life with a business in hand: the online store ‘El horno de las Monjas’. There he performed spiritual exercises periodically during his aspirant period until he made the decision to definitively enter this totally cloistered convent.

In her written goodbye, Montse recounted the “deep knowledge of the dirt” of her soul as she misunderstood the “desired perfection” to achieve “thing in this world” instead of “doing the will of God”. “I have lived twelve years ‘succeding’ according to the world’s parameters: I have university degrees, I have founded a ‘startup’ that has acquired a Fortune 100 and at only 34 years old I have become a partner at Deloitte”, said the now Augustinian nun.

The company that she created in 2011 in California and later sold in Silicon Valley, called Jetlore, pivoted around digital marketing and managed to build bridges and business relationships with exclusive clients such as LG, Inditex or eBay Such was the success that the online payment giant PayPal ended up buying it for several million dollars. “You never know where you are going to be in five years”, Montse commented in an interview with a YouTube channel in 2016, although she certainly did not imagine being one of the thirteen nuns who make up the community of the Monastery of Sant Mateu.

The Spanish guru received recognition from the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, an international competition for entrepreneurs and executives, and her name was included in the list of 21 young Spanish women under 35 years who have revolutionized the world of startups. However, her existential emptiness increased at the same rate as her trophy case.

Saint John of the Cross

 

(Juan de Yepes Alvarez, Fontiveros, Spain, 1542 – Ebeda, id, 1591) Spanish poet and religious. Born in am impoverished Hindu family, he began working very young in a hospital and received his intellectual training at the Jesuit school of Mediana del Campo.

In 1564 he began studying arts and philosophy at the University of Salamanca, where he met, in 1567, Saint Teresa of Jesus, with whom he agreed to found two new orders of Carmelites. His reformed barefoot Carmelite order stumbled upon the open hostility of the Carmelite shoes, despite which he managed to hold several positions. After teaching at a novice school in Mancera, he founded the school of Alcala de Henares. Later he became the confessor of the monastery of St. Teresa.

In 1577 the intrigues of the Carmelites shoes and he was imprisoned in a convent in Toledo for eight months. Alfer escaping, he sought refuge in Almodovar. He spent the rest of his life in Andalusia, where he became a provincial vicar. In 1591he fell again into disgrace and was deposed from all his religious positions, so he planned to emigrate to America, a project that frustrated his premature death. Canonized in 1726, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

The Poetry of Sain John of the Cross

Although the verses that are preserved from him are scarce and were not publish until after his death, he is considered one of the greatest Spanish poets of the time and as the greatest exponent of mystical poetry. During the months of his confinement in 1577, which he spent in complete isolation and subjected to cruel interrogations, he prepared his so-called major poems: Call of living love, Spiritual Song and Dark Night.

For fear of being taken by “illuminists”, none of these works were published before 1618, when, with the exception of a spiritual canoer who was nine years later in Brussels, they were published under the title of Spiritual Works that lead to a soul to perfect union with God. In 1962 the work was published in Rome in prose Notices for After professed, written shortly before he died.

In his three major poems, closely related to each other, John condemned his own personal experiences, derived from the constat yearning that his sould would reach the ideal fusion with his Creator; the three compositions, in one way or another, describe the mystical ascent of the soul to God, and since they arose as a transits from a mystical experience that was expressed in allegories and symbols, Saint John of the Cross considered that they should be explained. This led to the writing of prose comments to the poems.

In Call of Living love, Saint John of the Cross recreates the emotion of loving ecstasy, while in Dark Night, which consists of eight lire, he uses the image of a girl who escapes at night to go o an appointment with his lover as a representation of the flight from the soul of the prison of the senses, in search of communion with God.

Spiritual song is the most complex and extensive work of his production. In it, to detail the different paths that the soul runs until it is possible to merge with divinity, it develops a recreation, as an eclogue, of the biblical Song of Songs. Through forty lire he describes the hunt for the Bridegroom (God) by his wife (the soul), who asks about him to the creatures of nature. After finding it, there is a loving dialog that culminates in the union of the two lovers.

Unlike Saint Teresa of Jesus, who adopts the colloquial tone and nourishes the effects of light to express the experience of communion with God, the poetry of Saint John of the Cross is constituted in a living language that, drinking in various sources, seeks the expression of arrow and the ecstasy of the mystical union; its purpose is to translate, or the less to let us see, that invisible and ineffable reality that is divine love, appealing to symbolism and the rich expressive and fascinate even non-believers, because their verses, by operating mainly as expressive ways of an intimate personal experience, do not compromise beliefs, traditions or cultures not shared by the subject.

As fruit of this mystical outburst, far from any logical discourse, predominate in the major poems of Saint John of the Cross the irrational, subconscious and intuitive elements that translate stylistically into a tendency to synthesis and a great expressive density predominate in the major poems of him. To communicate the experience sensations, dispense with any superfluous element and uses the noun abundantly, to the detriment of verbs and adjectives. In order to make known the joys that the mystical link produces, it uses with profusion the affective twists, repetitions, antithesis, chaotic enumerations, the sudden passage from one subject to another or allegorical references, based, for the most past, on the subject of profane love. It also does not exclude the popular and rustic lexicon, dialects and diminutives, which are presented alongside educated voices and words of symbolic content.

In this way, combining the ancient symbolism of the Song of Song with the formular typical of petrarquism, Saint John of the Cross produces a rich mystical literature that sinks its roots in themes theology and the medieval German and Flemish mystics. Its production reflects a wide religious formation, although it leaves the influence of 16^th-century song, especially on the use of profane love to symbolize and represent the mystical feeling of divine love. The stanza most used in his poems is the lira, although he shows equal looseness in the use of octosylling romance.

To this also contributes its tendency to abandon the discursive register and eliminate neutral links without aesthetic value to seek a constant juxtaposition of poetic elements of great plasticity. All this, together with the intellectual rigor that the author himself highlighted in this comments, gives the poetry a singular balance between his sensual images and the acetic and sublime impulse that inspired it, and makes it one of the summits of Renaissance lyrical in Spanish language.

Saint Teresa of Jesus

 

(Gotarrendura, Avila, 1515 – Alba de Tormes, 1582) Religious and Spanish mystical writer, also know as Santa Teresa de Ávila. Teresa de Jesus is the name of religion adopter by Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, daughter of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, probable descendant of converted Jews, and Beatriz de Ahumada, belonging to a notable Abulian family. His life and spiritual evolution can be followed through his works of an autobiographical natura, including some of his greatest works: Life (written between 1562 and 1565), Spiritual Relations, the Book of Foundations (initiated in 1573 and published in 1610) and his nearly five hundred Letters.

Life ranges from his childhood to the foundation of the first renovated convent of San Jose de Avila, in 1562. Thanks to her she knows her childhood fondness to read lives of saints and the then popular calvary books, that Miguel de Cervantes would parody in Don Quixote de la Mancha a century later. In 1531, her father placed her as a pupil in the convent of Augustine nuns of Santa Maria de Grace, but the following year she had to return home suffering from a serious illness. Determined to take the Carmelite habit against his father’s will, in 1535 he fled his house to head to the convent of the Incarnation. He saw the habit the following year, and in 1537 he made his profession.

At that time a time of anguish and illness began for his, which would last until 1542. During these years she confesses that she learned to trust God unlimitedly and that she began to practice the method of prayer called “recognizing”, explained by Francis de Osuna in his ‘Third Spiritual alphabet’. She rejoiced from his ailments, she began to instruct a group of nuns of the Incarnation in the life of prayer and to plan the reform of the Carmelite order to restore the ancient rigor, mitigated in 1432 by Pope Eugene IV.

She then began to be favoured with visions- imaginary, and “intellectual”, visions that would happen throughout his life and that determined his crises to find out if that was the spirit of God, or the deceit. Its ideal of reform of the order was concretised in 1562 with the foundation of the convent of San José. Then begins a new stage in his life, in which the dedication to contemplation and prayer is shared with an extraordinary activity to achieve the triumph of the Carmelitean reform.

From 1567 until his death, he founded in Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladold, Toledo, Pastrana, Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Segovia, Beas, Seville, Caravaca, Villanueva de la Jara, Palencia, Soria and Burgos. In 1568 the first reformed male convent was erected in Duruelo, thanks to the collaboration of San Juan de la Cruz and Father Antonio de Heredia. She drafted the Constitutions (1563), which were approved in 1565 by Pius IV and which are based on the following points: life of prayer in the cell, fasting and abstinence of meat, renunciation of rents and properties (communal or private) and the practice of silence.

To help his nuns realize their ideal of religious life, he composed Camino de Perfection (written between 1562 and 1564 and published in 1583)  and The Homes or Castle Inner (1578). The reaction of members of the former Carmelite observance reached its climax in 1575, when they denounced the barefoot to the Inquisition. A brief from Rome, in 1580, ordered the separation of the two orders.

In 1604 the process of canonization of Teresa began. In 1614 she was declared a beate, and in 1622 she was canonized by Gregory XV. In 1970 she was proclaimed a doctor of Church, being the first woman to receive this distinction. In addition to the above-mentioned works, he left the following written: Meditations on song, Exclamations, Visiting barefoot, Notices, Ordinances of a brotherhood, Notes, Spiritual challenge, Vejamen and about thirty poetry.

 

Saint Francis Xavier

 

(Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta: Castle of Xavier, 1506 – Island of Sancian, China, 1522). Spanish missionary. While studying philosophy and theology in Paris he met Ignacio de Loyola, who recruited him for his project to found a new order. Francis made his first vows in Paris (1534), or a priest in Venice (1537) and participated in the foundation of the Society of Jesus in Rome (1539).

Since them he has been consecrated to missionary activity: in 1541 he was sent to India as a pontifical legacy, with the mission to evangelize the lands located east of Cape Good Hope, responding to a request from John III of Portugal. In 1542 in Goa (the capital of Portuguese India), it carried out intense activity caring for the sick, visiting prisoners, preaching Christianity, converting natives, negotiating with local authorities and defending justice against the abuses of settlers.

Its apostolate spread across southern India, Ceylon, Malacca, the Moluccas Islands and Japan. As he was preparing to enter China to continue his work, he died of pneumonia at the gates of Canton. He was canonized in 1622 and declared patron of missions of the Catholic Church.

Biography:

Francisco de Jasso was the youngest son of Juan de Jasso y Atondo, president of the Royal Council of Navarre, and María de Azpilicueta y Aznárez, head of the lordship of Javier, defenders of the cause of Juan de Albert in front of Ferdinand II the Catholic in the war that determined the annexation of Navarre to the Crown of Castile (1512-1515). After the death of his father (1515) and the demolition of the towers and walls of Javier’s castle by order of Cardinal Cisneros (1516) as a result of the support given by his brothers Juan and Miguel to the uprising in favour of the dethroned Navarra king, Francisco Javier oriented towards the ecclesiastical career and the cultivation of the humanities, which he studied in Leyre and Pamplona.

In 1525, probably already acquired the tonsure, he moved to Paris to complete his training; he entered as an intern at the College of Santa Barbara, where he made friends with Pedro Fabro and Ignacio de Loyola. In 1530 he graduated from as a teacher in the arts and went on to teach philosophy with the position of regent professor at Dormans-Beauvais College, while studying theology. In order to acquire ecclesiastical benefits, in 1531 he requested in 1531 the council of Pamplona to grant a canonja , claiming his status as a Navarra cleric and his degree in arts.

However, his relationship with Ignacio de Loyola, who intended to attract him to the project of founding a new religious order, as well as his displeasure with the university environment and the impression caused by the death of his mother and sister, which took place at that time, determined Francisco Javier to abandon his promotional claims within the ecclesiastical establishment. Together with Ignacio de Loyola and five other comrades, gathered in the Parisian chapel of Montmatre, on August 14,1534 he vowed vows of chastity and poverty, of life consecrated to the apostolate and of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or, in the event that the latter was not possible, to make himself available to the Pope.

In 1537 he moved to Venice, where he met with his companions in order to travel to Rome to obtain the papal blessing before starting his pilgrimage; during his staying in Venice he received news of the concession of the requested cononja, to which he renounced, and the beginning of the war between Constantinople and Venice, which meant the indefinite delay of the trip to the Holy Land. Ordained a priest on June 24 of that year, he devoted himself to preaching in Bologna until his departure to Rome, where Francis and his companions met with Paul III and definitively abandoned their pilgrimage purposes.

During their stay at the Holy See they managed the foundation of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, to which the Pope granted his verbal approval in September 1539. That year Ignacio de Loyola learned that Jonh III of Portugal asked missionaries to march to preach Christianity in his possessions in the East Indies and entrusted the task to Fracis Xavier, who in March 1540 left for the Portuguese court to organize the expedition, with the title of pontifical legacy for all lands located east of the Cape of Good Hope.

Started the trip in Abril 1541, he arrived in Goa, the capital of Portuguese possessions in India, thirteen months later. He carried out an active evangelizing work in this city, especially since the foundation of the school-seminar of Santa Fe for native priests, and of dedication to the sick and prisoners. In September 1542 he organized a missionary expedition to the coast of Pesqueria, in southeastern India, to preach Christian doctrine among the villages; established a Christian community and provided it with a catechism in the indigenous language. After that, the evangelization of Travancor and Ceylon, Madra and Malaca and the Moluccas Islands began. Francis Xavier administered baptism to thousands of natives, overcome the opposition of the Brahmins and established a assiduous correspondence with the members of the Society of Jesus in Rome, whose news, to which his reputation as taumaturgo gave rise to numerous missionary vocations among his companions.

After a new stay in India and Malacca, dedicated to reorganizing the established missions and providing them with operations rules, he went to evangelize Japan, when he arrive in 1549; he preached for two years in Kagoshima, Hirado, Yamaguchi and Bungo, establishing favorable contacts for his work with the Japanese Daymians or feudal governors, although the opposition of the Buddhist monks greatly hindered his activity, in the face of the few conservations achieved in Japan, it was persuaded that to succeed in its company it was necessary to evangelize China previously, since it considered that the Japanese had assimilated the culture of this empire and that, therefore, the example of Christianity in China would exert decisive influence on Japan.

Claimed by the missionary communities of India, he returned to Goa in 1551, where he began the necessary procedures to organize his intended trip to China, hindered by the prohibition in this empire over the entry of foreigners into his territory. After his appointment as a provincial of India, which had been constituted as the independent Jesuit province of Portugal, he left for China with a Portuguese embassy in April 1552, but had to stop in Malaca, where he spent two months trying to overcome the resistance that Governor Alvaro de Ataide opposed the project.

He finally reprimanded the trip to the island of Sancayan, where death occurred before the Chinese reed arrived that was to transport him to Canton. His remains were transferred to Goa in 1554, where his cult spread quickly. At the beginning of the 17^th century the process of his beatification began, proclaimed by Paul V on October 25, 1619; appointed patron of Navarre in 1621, on March 12 of the following year he was canonized by Gregory XV, together with Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Pius X declared him patron of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1904, and Pius XI patron of all missions in 1927. His party is celebrated on December 3.