Pope Francis: Sunday Angelus, 2013-06-30 (full text)

Pope Francis prayed the Angelus on Sunday with faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square. In remarks before the traditional prayer of Marian devotion, the Holy Father spoke of the conscience as the interior space in which we can listen to and hear the truth, the good, the voice of God. Pope Francis praised his predecessor, Benedict XVI, as a model of docile attention to the voice of one’s conscience. “Pope Benedict XVI has given us a great example in this sense,” he said. “When the Lord had made it clear, in prayer, what was the step he had to take, he followed, with a great sense of discernment and courage, his conscience, that is the will of God speaking to his heart.” Below, please find Vatican Radio’s translation of the Holy Father’s remarks.

**********************************************************

Dear brothers and sisters,

This Sunday's Gospel (Lk 9:51-62) shows a very important step in the life of Christ: the moment in which, as St Luke writes, "[Jesus] steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem. (9:51 )” Jerusalem is the final destination, where Jesus, in his last Passover, must die and rise again, and so to fulfill His mission of salvation.

From that time, forth, after the steadfast decision, Jesus aims straight for the finish line, and even to the people he meets and who ask to [be allowed to] follow Him, He says clearly what are the conditions: not having a permanent abode; knowing how to detach oneself from familiar affections; not succumbing to nostalgia for the past.

Jesus also said to his disciples, charged with preceding Him on the way to Jerusalem to announce His coming, not to impose anything: if they do not find willing welcome, they are [simply] to proceed further, to move on. Jesus never imposes. Jesus is humble. Jesus extends invitations: “If you want, come.” The humility of Jesus is like this: He always invites us. He does not impose.

All this makes us think. It tells us, for example, the importance, even for Jesus, of conscience: listening in his heart to the Father's voice, and following it. Jesus, in his earthly life, was not, so to speak, “remote-controlled”: He was the Word made flesh, the Son of God made man, and at one point he made a firm decision to go up to Jerusalem for the last time - a decision taken in His conscience, but not on His own: ​​with the Father, in full union with Him! He decided in obedience to the Father, in profound intimate attunement to the Father’s will. For this reason, then, was the decision was steadfast: because it was taken together with the Father. In the Father, then, Jesus found the strength and the light for His journey. Jesus was free. His decision was a free one. Jesus wants us Christians to be free as he is: with that liberty, which comes from this dialogue with the Father, this dialogue with God. Jesus wants neither selfish Christians, who follow their egos and do not speak with God, nor weak Christians, without will: “remote-controlled” Christians, incapable of creativity, who seek ever to connect with the will of another, and are not free. Jesus wants us free, and this freedom – where is it found? It is to be found in the inner dialogue with God in conscience. If a Christian does not know how to talk with God, does not know how to listen to God, in his own conscience, then he is not free – he is not free.

So we also must learn to listen more to our conscience. Be careful, however: this does not mean we ought to follow our ego, do whatever interests us, whatever suits us, whatever pleases us. That is not conscience. Conscience is the interior space in which we can listen to and hear the truth, the good, the voice of God. It is the inner place of our relationship with Him, who speaks to our heart and helps us to discern, to understand the path we ought to take, and once the decision is made, to move forward, to remain faithful.

Pope Benedict XVI has given us a great example in this sense. When the Lord had made it clear, in prayer, what was the step he had to take, he followed, with a great sense of discernment and courage, his conscience, that is, the will of God that spoke to his heart – and this example of our father does much good to all of us, as an example to follow.

Our Lady, with great simplicity, listened to and meditated deep within herself upon the Word of God and what was happening to Jesus. She followed her son deep conviction, with steadfast hope. May Mary help us to become more and more men and women of conscience – free in our conscience, because it is in conscience that the dialogue with God is given – men and women able to hear the voice of God and follow it with decision.

After the Angelus, the Holy Father had these remarks:

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today in Italy we celebrate the Day of charity of the Pope. I desire to thank the bishops and all the parishes, especially the poorest ones, for the prayers and offerings that support the many pastoral initiatives and charitable activities of the Successor of Peter in every part of the world. Thank you all!

I extend my heartfelt greetings to all the pilgrims present, particularly to the many faithful from Germany. I also greet the pilgrims from Madrid, Augsburg, Sonnino, Casarano, Lenola, Sambucetole and Montegranaro, the group of lay Dominicans, the Apostolic Fraternity of Divine Mercy in Piazza Armerina, the Friends of the Missions of the Precious Blood, UNITALSI of Ischia di Castro and the children of Latisana.

I wish you all a good Sunday!

(Vatican Radio)

Pope Francis: Mass and Angelus on Sts Peter and Paul

'via Blog this'
(News.va) Pope Francis marked the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul with Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, during which he imposed the pallium on thirty-four of the metropolitan archbishops installed over the past year. The pallium is the white, shawl-like woolen liturgical vestment worn over the shoulders of a metropolitan archbishop, which is the peculiar sign of a metropolitan’s office: it specifically symbolizes authority and union with the Holy See. Each year on the feast, the Metropolitan archbishops installed during the course of the preceding year travel to Rome to receive the vestment. The solemnity is also one of the two days in the liturgical year in which the ancient bronze statue of St Peter in the basilica is symbolically vested in an ornate red silk cope and crowned with the triple tiara. 

After processing into the basilica with the thirty-four new metropolitans and hearing the readings, Pope Francis delivered a homily in which he focused on the mystery of the Petrine ministry as one particularly ordered to confirming all Christians everywhere in faith, love and unity. “Faith in Christ,” said Pope Francis, “is the light of our life as Christians.“ Addressing himself to the new metropolitans, the Pope said, “To confess the Lord by letting oneself be taught by God; to be consumed by love for Christ and his Gospel; to be servants of unity. These, dear brother bishops, are the tasks which the holy apostles Peter and Paul entrust to each of us, so that they can be lived by every Christian.”

This was a theme to which the Holy Father returned after Mass, in remarks to the faithful gathered in St Peter's square for the Angelus prayer. “What a joy it is to believe in a God who is all Love, all Grace,” he said. Also at the Angelus, Pope Francis also greeted the delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, led by Metropolitan Ioannis Zizoulas. “Let us not forget that Peter had a brother, Andrew,” said Pope Francis, “who met Jesus first, spoke of Him to Peter and took Peter to meet [the Lord].”

Then Pope Francis asked all the gathered faithful to join him in praying a Hail Mary for Patriarch Bartholomew.

In conclusion, the Holy Father greeted all the pilgrim faithful who, from every part of the world, were come to celebrate the feast in Rome.

Facebook's outmoded Web crypto opens door to NSA spying | Politics and Law - CNET News

Facebook's outmoded Web crypto opens door to NSA spying | Politics and Law - CNET News: 

'via Blog this'

It's relatively easy for the National Security Agency's spooks to break outdated Web encryption after vacuuming up data from fiber taps, cryptographers say. But Facebook is still using it.

A Facebook data center. The company uses outdated Web encryption, which makes users' communications vulnerable to the National Security Agency. But the social network is planning to upgrade. (Credit: Facebook)

Secret documents describing the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus have highlighted vulnerabilities in outdated Web encryption used by Facebook and a handful of other U.S. companies.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA taps into fiber optic cables "upstream" from Internet companies and vacuums up e-mail and other data that "flows past" -- a security vulnerability that "https" Web encryption is intended to guard against.

But Facebook and a few other companies still rely on an encryption technique viewed as many years out of date, which cryptographers say the NSA could penetrate reasonably quickly after intercepting the communications. Facebook uses encryption keys with a length of only 1024 bits, while Web companies including Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Dropbox, and even Myspace have switched to exponentially more secure 2,048-bit keys.

Eran Tromer, an assistant professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University who wrote his 2007 dissertation on custom code-breaking hardware, says it's now "feasible to build dedicated hardware devices that can break 1024-bit RSA keys at a cost of under $1 million per device." Each dedicated device would be able to break a 1024-bit key in one year, he says.

"Realistically, right now, breaking 1024-bit RSA should be considered well within reach by leading nations, and marginally safe against other players," Tromer says. "This is unsatisfactory as the default security level of the Internet."

The NSA's budget is estimated to be at least $10 billion a year.

Facebook declined to comment for this article. A person familiar with the company's encryption development plans, however, said the social network is working on switching over to 2048-bit keys relatively soon.

Encryption that's used to shield the privacy of Web browsing is known as RSA, a form of public key cryptography based on the fact that it is immensely difficult to factor large numbers. As microprocessor speeds continue to advance, however, RSA keys with lengths that were previously viewed as secure have fallen to brute force attacks.

"Some companies may not feel that intelligence agencies are a threat they care about, so may feel less pressure to upgrade," says Ron Rivest, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and the "R" in RSA. Tromer's published estimates of code-breaking times are "plausible," Rivest says, and it's possible that "additional benefits might be obtained by an intensive research and engineering push."

In 1999, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore built a custom machine called "Deep Crack," which performed a brute force attack against a 56-bit DES key (the equivalent of a 384-bit RSA key) in under 23 hours. An RSA key with a length of 768 bits was factored (PDF) in December 2009 by an international team of computer science researchers.

Factoring a 1024-bit RSA key is about 1,000 times as hard as a 768-bit key -- an expensive but hardly difficult task for the NSA or other well-resourced national intelligence agencies. That's why NIST recommended (PDF) that 1024-bit RSA keys are no longer viable after 2010, and companies that sell Web SSL certificates began to phase out 1024-bit RSA keys in favor of 2048-bit RSA keys a few years ago.

Google also uses 1024-bit keys, but in 2011 it implemented a clever trick called forward secrecy, meaning a different key is used for each encrypted Web session, instead of a single master key that's used to encrypt billions of them. The company said last month it will switch over to 2048-bit keys by the end of 2013.

"We would have preferred to move sooner, but operating at the scale we do, client compatibility is always an issue," says Adam Langley, a software engineer at Google. "Everything on the planet seems to connect to us."

Langley added: "We would have totally eaten the cost and the speed years ago -- if we could have done it without worries." As an additional precaution, Langley says, Google usually rotates its RSA keys every two weeks. (Facebook does it once a year, and is also planning to make forward secrecy a default setting for users, which few other companies do. Once Facebook switches to 2048-bit keys and forward secrecy, its users will be better protected against NSA surveillance than almost any other company.)

Beyond Facebook, other companies still using 1024-bit encryption keys include Capital One bank and Amazon.com's U.K. and Japan sites. Web sites that have veered in the opposite direction with 4096-bit RSA keys include Apache.org, Hugedomains.com, Openoffice.org, Phpbb.com, and Shareasale.com.

Classified NSA documents published by the Guardian over the last few weeks have sketched an outline of a massive surveillance system that vacuums up billions of Americans' e-mail messages and other private correspondence. One document prepared by the NSA's Special Source Operations directorate, for instance, said the agency had "processed its one-trillionth metadata record" by December 2012.

Documents that came to light in 2006 in a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation offer some insight into the spy agency's relationship with Tier 1 providers. Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, disclosed (PDF) that he witnessed domestic voice and Internet traffic being surreptitiously "diverted" through a "splitter cabinet" to secure room 641A in one of the company's San Francisco facilities. The room was accessible only to NSA-cleared technicians.

To be sure, even weak encryption is more privacy-protective than no encryption, which is still the default for routine Web browsing.

Chris Soghoian, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says companies that don't use strong encryption are "being cheap" because they can get "more encryption per second per server" with a shorter RSA key.

Tromer, the Tel Aviv University cryptographer, has described in a series of papers (PDF), including some co-authored with Adi Shamir, the "S" in RSA, how technological progress makes custom code-breaking hardware ever faster. Moving to 90 nanometer semiconductor technology that was reached in 2005 brings the cost to $1.1 million for hardware that breaks 1024-bit keys at the rate of one a year, not counting initial engineering and fabrication, he says. Today's 22 nanometer technology brings a "significant further reduction" in cost, he says.

Another technological approach the NSA or other well-resourced intelligence agencies could use -- putting aside social engineering attacks or intrusions into data centers -- is using off-the-shelf computers in a brute force attack against an RSA key.

"Why use specialized hardware?" says Arjen Lenstra, a number theorist and professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who participated in the successful 2009 effort to factor a 768-bit RSA key. A few "million CPUs for a year suffices for 1024 RSA," Lenstra says.

Langley, the Google software engineer, says his employer could devote some of its massive computing resources to breaking a 1024-bit RSA key if it chose to do so.

"It could be done today," Langley says. "We could do it if we really wanted." But, he adds, there are better ways to spend millions of dollars in a way that will "advance the state of cryptography research."

Stunning Photos Of The Supermoon From Around The Globe - Forbes

From Stunning Photos Of The Supermoon From Around The Globe - Forbes:

'via Blog this'

Credits to Forbes.com

Pope modifies Mass: 'St. Joseph' added to Eucharistic prayers

     June 19, 2013. The Pope has approved a new addition to the Latin Rite Mass. The name of St. Joseph, will be included after the usual prayer to the Virgin Mary. 

The change in the text was also approved by the Congregation for Divine Worship. The modification itself was in the works under the Pontificate of Benedict XVI. Now, Pope Francis confirmed the decision. 

Up to now, the only reference to St. Joseph was in the so-called Roman Canon, and was introduced by the blessed John XXIII during the Second Vatican Council. 

Currently, the decree has only been published in Latin. So after the reference to the Virgin Mary, the phrase reads, 'cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso,' which translates to St. Joseph, her husband. But the Vatican is working on various translations in other languages. Since the change is simple, priests are allowed to put it into practice immediately.

NEW VERSION IN ENGLISH

II:

that with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,

with Blessed Joseph, her Spouse,

with the blessed Apostles

III:

with the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,

with blessed Joseph, her Spouse,

with your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs

IV:

with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

with blessed Joseph, her Spouse,

and with your Apostles

FULL TEXT OF THE DECREE:

Exercising his paternal care over Jesus, Saint Joseph of Nazareth, set over the Lord’s family, marvelously fulfilled the office he received by grace. Adhering firmly to the mystery of God’s design of salvation in its very beginnings, he stands as an exemplary model of the kindness and humility that the Christian faith raises to a great destiny, and demonstrates the ordinary and simple virtues necessary for men to be good and genuine followers of Christ. Through these virtues, this Just man, caring most lovingly for the Mother of God and happily dedicating himself to the upbringing of Jesus Christ, was placed as guardian over God the Father’s most precious treasures. Therefore he has been the subject of assiduous devotion on the part of the People of God throughout the centuries, as the support of that mystical body, which is the Church.

The faithful in the Catholic Church have shown continuous devotion to Saint Joseph and have solemnly and constantly honored his memory as the most chaste spouse of the Mother of God and as the heavenly Patron of the universal Church. For this reason Blessed Pope John XXIII, in the days of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, decreed that Saint Joseph’s name be added to the ancient Roman Canon.

In response to petitions received from places throughout the world, the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI deemed them worthy of implementation and graciously approved them. The Supreme Pontiff Francis likewise has recently confirmed them. In this the Pontiffs had before their eyes the full communion of the Saints who, once pilgrims in this world, now lead us to Christ and unite us with him.

Accordingly, mature consideration having been given to all the matters mentioned here above, this Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, by virtue of the faculties granted by the Supreme Pontiff Francis, is pleased to decree that the name of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary is henceforth to be added to Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV, as they appear in the third typical edition of the Roman Missal, after the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as follows: 

- in Eucharistic Prayer II: “ut cum beáta Dei Genetríce Vírgine María, beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, beátis Apóstolis”;

- in Eucharistic Prayer III: “cum beatíssima Vírgine, Dei Genetríce, María, cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, cum beátis Apóstolis”;

- in Eucharistic Prayer IV: “cum beáta Vírgine, Dei Genetríce, María, cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, cum Apóstolis ”.

As regards the Latin text, these formulas are hereby declared typical. The Congregation itself will soon provide vernacular translations in the more widespread western languages; as for other languages, translations are to be prepared by the Bishops’ Conferences, according to the norm of law, to be confirmed by the Holy See through this Dicastery.

All things to the contrary notwithstanding.

From the offices of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 1 May 2013, on the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker.

ANTONIO, CARD. CAÑIZARES LLOVERA

Prefect

ARTURO ROCHE

Archbishop Secretary

Source: http://www.romereports.com