"Some people gather well before Mass on Sunday, and many others stay on after Mass to spend time with the sisters and the other families."

"Dear friends, thank you very much, we receive your help. May God bless you for this sign of solidarity for our priests and nuns.”

Whether big or small, each of the order’s houses or convents has been turned into a point of refuge for the neediest:

"Every day we lose thousands of our best engineers, our best doctors, our best teachers, because the loss of value of the Lebanese pound to the dollar destroyed the value of salaries.”

Cardinal Dolan called on faithful to help persecuted Christians, and in doing so model themselves on St. Veronica, who comforted Jesus on the way to Golgotha and St. Simon of Cyrene, who carried his cross. The task at hand for Christians in the West, said the Cardinal, is “prayer, advocacy, and relief.”

"We live in a country where Christianity is often no more than skin deep; it hasn’t grown roots in the life of the population."