The Internet exploded with traffic on Wednesday afternoon as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as pontiff. Social media sites such as Facebook (FB) lit up, and Twitter said it peaked at 130,000 tweets per minute. That’s nearly as much traffic as the 150,000 tweet-per-minute peak of this year’s Super Bowl and double […]

  A divisive debate over Lebanon’s electoral law may delay parliamentary elections scheduled for June 9, stoking fears of instability in a country already rattled by the conflict in neighboring Syria. Nominations opened on Monday but no candidate has yet been registered. Meanwhile, rival political groups have quibbled over how legislative power should be shared out […]

Feastday: October 4
Patron and Animals, Merchants & Ecology
1181 – 1226

Founder of the Franciscan Order, born at Assisi in Umbria, in 1181.
 

In 1182, Pietro Bernardone returned from a trip to France to find out his wife had given birth to a son. Far from being excited or apologetic because he’d been gone, Pietro was furious because she’d had his new son baptized Giovanni after John the Baptist. The last thing Pietro wanted in his son was a man of God — he wanted a man of business, a cloth merchant like he was, and he especially wanted a son who would reflect his infatuation with France. So he renamed his son Francesco — which is the equivalent of calling him Frenchman.

Francis enjoyed a very rich easy life growing up because of his father’s wealth and the permissiveness of the times. From the beginning everyone — and I mean everyone — loved Francis. He was constantly happy, charming, and a born leader. If he was picky, people excused him. If he was ill, people took care of him. If he was so much of a dreamer he did poorly in school, no one minded. In many ways he was too easy to like for his own good. No one tried to control him or teach him.

As he grew up, Francis became the leader of a crowd of young people who spent their nights in wild parties. Thomas of Celano, his biographer who knew him well, said, "In other respects an exquisite youth, he attracted to himself a whole retinue of young people addicted to evil and accustomed to vice." Francis himself said, "I lived in sin" during that time.

Francis fulfilled every hope of Pietro’s — even falling in love with France. He loved the songs of France, the romance of France, and especially the free adventurous troubadours of France who wandered through Europe. And despite his dreaming, Francis was also good at business. But Francis wanted more..more than wealth. But not holiness! Francis wanted to be a noble, a knight. Battle was the best place to win the glory and prestige he longed for. He got his first chance when Assisi declared war on their longtime enemy, the nearby town of Perugia.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopy

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ (born December 17, 1936) is the current pope of the Roman Catholic Church, elected on March 13, 2013, and taking the regnal name of Francis., after St. Francis of Assisi ^[1]

Prior to his election, he served as an Argentine cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He has served as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires since 1998. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 2001.

    Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 76 years old, is the new pope from Argentina.

  VATICAN CITY — With a puff of white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and to the cheers of thousands of rain-soaked faithful, a gathering of Catholic cardinals picked a new pope from among their midst on Wednesday. The name of the new pope, the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, […]

    President Michel Suleiman headed on Tuesday to Africa on an 8-day tour at the head of a delegation, the state-run National News Agency reported. The President will hold talks with senior African officials in Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria in addition to the Lebanese community in those countries. Suleiman is accompanied by first […]

  BEIRUT: It started with a mask and a raunchy hip thrust. The Harlem Shake, a viral YouTube video trend, hit Lebanon several weeks ago and has been recreated by random strangers on the streets of Beirut, university students, club-goers and office workers. The dance video phenomenon began with a group of Australian teenagers who […]