ZAATARI CAMP, Jordan (CNS) — As a number of Syrian refugees enter their fourth winter of displacement, without an end in sight to violent fighting in their nation, Mahmoud summed up how they feel.

“There seems to be nothing ahead of us or behind,” the father of four told Catholic News Service in early November. “Every day, week or month, people are being buried back home. But nothing changed for the positive in this situation.”

“Our life in Syria was different from our difficult existence in this camp living as Syrian refugees,” Mahmoud said, referring to Jordan’s largest camp, located in the desert, a mere dozen miles away from the border of his war-torn homeland.

Because of a lack of international funding to the United Nations and host countries, such as Jordan, financial aid for food and living expenses has been cut. Refugees now get just 50 cents a day per person, forcing some Syrians to consider whether to remain in Jordan, travel back to Syria or beyond.

“At the moment, refugees are leaving because the overall assistance is not sufficient and they have had a lack of hope here,” said Andrew Harper, the U.N. refugee agency’s representative in Jordan. He said that despite some success in providing badly needed aid, “it’s a very tough environment for refugees. We have to do much more than we are currently doing.”

The U.N. refugee agency reports that, currently, about 100 Syrians living in Jordan return home nearly every day.

One refugee, a 30-year old-divorcee with three young children, said she planned to return to Syria in early November with the intention of making the increasingly dangerous sea voyage to Europe’s shores and beyond.

More than 400 refugees, including many children, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, have drowned in the Aegean Sea since the start of the year in their attempt to cross from Turkey to Greece.

However, scores of Syrians still cross Jordan’s border in search of safety, particularly as Syria’s southern Daraa province has come under renewed bombing. Activists there believe Russia is also now involved in carrying out airstrikes on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

With winter’s approach, Syrian refugees like Mahmoud said they prefer to stay put in Jordan. They have heard tales from relatives and friends saying the journey to Europe in search of a better life has turned sour for some who have risked the perilous trip.

“Some friends and my brother went to Germany. I speak with him on Skype,” Mahmoud said. “He finds himself moving from one place to another there.”

Mahmoud said his brother told him “he is not happy as he thought he would be.”

“He now wishes that he didn’t make the journey to Germany. He was dreaming of a normal life and to bring his family there, but it takes much longer than he expected, with a lot of paperwork involved,” said Mahmoud, who earns a bit of money by helping other refugees in the camp retrieve precious photos from their cellphones. “The situation isn’t as they saw it on the news.”

However, most of Jordan’s more than 680,000 registered Syrian refugees live outside camps and in communities. Often, they are more vulnerable than those living in camps, because they find it difficult to pay rent and buy basic necessities.

Rajha was widowed after her husband was detained by Assad’s forces and tortured to death in a jail in the central city of Homs. She fled with her three children for safety to Mafraq, a town that now has more Syrians than Jordanians.

The woman, clad in black from head to toe, including a face veil, said her two adolescent sons must work collecting plastic for recycling and loading boxes of vegetables in the market, rather than attend school in order to help the family pay bills. But the small amount they earn means that she owes her Jordanian neighbors $570 — a huge sum for her family to repay.

Although the U.N. food program has provided the family with aid, Rajha said she appreciates the one-time gift of $380 from the International Catholic Migration Commission, especially for winter.

“We need to buy a heater, heating fuel, food and some winter garments, maybe even change this simple two-room house, because it is so unhealthy,” she said.

“There no proper roof, so when it rains or snows, we have to move to other room,” Rajha said of the shelter that resembles a stable. Rats have infested the basic kitchen.

“My daughter asks why we live in this bad house. The rent is very low and this is only what I can afford,” she said, with tears welling in her brown eyes. Her 11-year-old daughter clings to a photo of her father, the only adornment in the house.

Emma Horton, an International Catholic Migration Commission program manager, said she hopes to refer Rajha to another aid group, the Norwegian Refugee Council, which help refugees locate safer, subsidized housing in the community.

“I don’t have any hope for the future. I can only live from day to day,” said the widow. “For sure, we can never return to Syria. My children and I would face great danger there.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — A group of young adults from North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia received scrolls commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World; dangling from the ribbon around each scroll was a flash drive containing the entire text of the document.

At the Vatican Nov. 5, the document was handed on to a new generation by: Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, 83, a member of the council; Swiss Cardinal Georges Cottier, 93, an expert at the council; Alain Delaunoy, 89, an expert on financial matters at the council; and Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, 90.

In his “testimony” to the young people, Cardinal Montezemolo explained that he was not at the council, but half a world away. He was secretary of the Vatican nunciature in Japan in 1964.

Just before the third session of the council began that fall, he opened a copy of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, and saw a headline that Blessed Paul VI had decided to name some women as council observers.

“I remember saying to myself, ‘Now women are even entering the council!'” he told the young people in a tone that did not convey complete approval. “Then I read the names and the first woman mentioned was my mother!”

The cardinal said he wrote his mother a letter congratulating her, but adding, “I don’t know if I should greet you as ‘dear mama’ or ‘your eminence’ or ‘most reverend excellency.'”

Amalia di Montezemolo led an Italian association, made up mostly of widows like herself, who worked with the country’s military ordinary providing spiritual and material assistance to members of the military and their families. The cardinal said his mother did not speak much about her experience at the council because she felt bound to secrecy.

The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace gathered Cardinal Montezemolo and the others as firsthand witnesses to the council and to speak specifically about the pastoral constitution, which is widely known by its Latin title “Gaudium et Spes.” Their “testimony” kicked off a two-day meeting of experts in Catholic social teaching and young Catholics to discuss the ongoing relevance of the council document.

Oblate Father Andrew Small, director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, told participants that

the document presents the church’s mission as healing the world’s wounds through evangelization and its work for justice and peace. The mission requires recognizing the dignity and responsibility of laypeople, who are called to exercise their vocation in the world, and reading “the signs of the times” in order to respond to God’s call and meet real needs.

Cardinal Arinze, who was ordained a bishop in 1965 only two weeks before the start of the council’s last session, said his only contribution to “Gaudium et Spes” was “my signature at the end.”

The document has had a huge influence on the church and “its vision of the world,” he said. The church’s concern for the real world and the concrete situation of human beings flows, as the document said, from the fact that Christ became human and lived in the world.

While all are called to use their earthly lives to prepare for life in heaven, the document makes clear that Christians should not be “irrelevant citizens” of this world, but active participants in making the world a better place, Cardinal Arinze said.

“Gaudium et Spes” also emphasizes how one’s temporal duties and duties as a citizen are responsibilities to one’s neighbors and to God, the cardinal said. The document insists that laypeople take charge of their “specific apostolate” of bringing the Gospel to bear on politics, social life and the economy.

“Laypeople must not expect from their pastors an answer to every question that arises in matters social, political, cultural,” he said. “The layperson, paying attention to the doctrine of the church and with the aid of the sacraments, takes on his distinctive role or her distinctive role.”

Cardinal Cottier said the document “remains as fresh as it was 50 years ago,” calling Catholics to a spirituality that looks for signs of God’s presence in the world and ways to bring God’s love, justice and healing to situations of confusion, poverty, injustice and conflict.

Delaunoy told the young people he sees a “remarkable continuity between St. John XXIII and Pope Francis,” particularly in their “openness to the world and to seeing all people as brothers and sisters.”

Perhaps the most important impact of the council, he said, was the freedom and responsibility it gave laypeople. Although not all the results have been positive, the church at the Second Vatican Council encouraged all Catholics to pray, to read Scripture, to understand church teaching and to apply it in their lives.

When he was growing up, Delaunoy said, “you had to obey before understanding or even without understanding.”

Religion was more a matter of “convention than conviction,” he said. Today young people are questioning and searching; those who arrive at faith, Delaunoy said, will be better Christians and more able to help the world around them.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The secret to healing wounds among family members is to “not end the day in war” and to forgive one another, Pope Francis said.

“One cannot live without forgiving, or at least one cannot live well, especially in the family,” the pope said Nov. 4 at his weekly general audience.

Recalling the recent Synod of Bishops on the family, the pope said that he wanted the final report to be published so that all may take part in the work of the past two years. However, he said, his general audience talk would not examine the conclusions but rather reflect on the great gift that marriage and the family are for society, especially in a world that “at times becomes barren of life and love.”

The pope told the estimated 15,000 people in St. Peter’s Square that families are like “a great gym where one trains in giving and in mutual forgiveness.” Using the Gospel account of Jesus teaching the ‘Our Father,’ the pope stressed that forgiveness heals the wounds often caused “by our weaknesses and our selfishness.”

“There is a simple secret in order to heal wounds and dissolve accusations: Do not end the day without asking forgiveness from one another, without making peace between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, daughters-in law and mothers-in law,” he said.

By immediately asking for forgiveness and forgiving others, the pope continued, the family becomes stronger and creates a solid foundation that can withstand any difficulties that may come.

In order to forgive, Pope Francis told the crowd, “you don’t need to make a great speech; a caress is sufficient and it’s all over. But, do not end the day in war. Understood?”

The pope also stressed that the synod emphasized the role that forgiveness plays in the vocation and mission of the family and that it not only saves families from divisions but helps society “become less evil and less cruel” as well.

The church, he assured, “is always near to help you build your house upon the rock of which Jesus spoke.”

Christian families, the pope said, can do much for society and the church and the upcoming Holy Year of Mercy can be an occasion for families “to rediscover the treasure of mutual forgiveness.”

“Let us pray so that families may always be more capable of living and building concrete paths of reconciliation, where no one feels abandoned by the weight of their trespasses,” the pope said.

YANGON, Myanmar (CNS) — From his residence at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Cardinal Charles Bo has a front-row seat to the changes sweeping across his country. What he has witnessed ahead of the nation’s Nov. 8 election — the first fully contested since 1990 — has troubled him, reported ucanews.com.

Specific links between political parties and religious groups are outlawed by the constitution, and the situation is now raising fresh questions about the country’s future at a crucial point on Myanmar’s journey from military dictatorship to a functioning democracy.

“The trend is like a mix of religion and politics,” Cardinal Bo told ucanews.com in an interview at his Yangon residence.

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His chief concern is the emergence of the hard-line Buddhist monk movement, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, commonly known as Ma Ba Tha. The group was formalized in 2014 following two years during which the country’s minority Muslims, who account for about 7 percent of the country’s 50 million people, found themselves under attack in deadly violence that the monks helped ferment.

The movement has taken on a tone that is Buddhist nationalist and overtly anti-Muslim. Some senior members of the movement have given personal endorsements to President Thein Sein, who is seeking a second five-year term.

While the power of such backing can only be measured at the ballot box, the group’s growing influence is undeniable.

It was Ma Ba Tha that successfully lobbied the government for the introduction of four race and religion laws that opposition parties and international observers have condemned as discriminatory. The clerics had argued that Myanmar’s Buddhist identity was at risk, claiming a growing but unspecified influence by the Muslim minority.

Critics say the race and religion laws are squarely aimed at the nation’s 1 million or so ethnic Rohingya people. The regulations impose mandatory “birth spacing” for women; Buddhist women must register their marriages in advance if marrying a man outside their faith; and restrictions on religious conversions have been enshrined in legislation.

Ma Ba Tha’s September “victory” celebrations after the laws were enshrined have only increased perceptions of their political influence.

Yet for Cardinal Bo, this was a disturbing display of “tribalism” in a country that teems with a multitude of languages, ethnicities and religions — although ethnic Bamar Buddhists represent the largest single group.

“The attitude that Myanmar must have one race and one religion, such as Bamar and Buddhist, is not acceptable,” he warned.

Cardinal Bo has been one of the rare voices with international heft in Myanmar to speak out against hate speech and religious discrimination. Many international rights groups had hoped such a role would naturally be taken up by Aung San Suu Kyi, the popular opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Yet she has been largely silent about widespread discrimination against Myanmar’s Muslims — particularly the Rohingya community in tense Rakhine state, where violence in 2012 left scores dead and more than 150,000 people still trapped in internal refugee camps that they are forbidden, at gunpoint, to leave.

“Suu Kyi should speak out on the conflict in Kachin state and on Rohingya Muslims, who are confined to the camps,” said Cardinal Bo, who admitted he admires her personal integrity, fearlessness and passion.

In September, Cardinal Bo issued an appeal denouncing the race and religion laws and demanding their repeal.

“Parliament was coerced by a fringe group of the religious elite to enact four black laws, fragmenting the dream of a united Myanmar,” Cardinal Bo wrote.

He said the compassionate teachings of Buddhism in Myanmar were being threatened by “peddlers of hatred.”

In another message shortly after this, the cardinal urged all of Myanmar’s citizens to vote. The message was framed as a guideline for selecting the best candidate.

While he was careful to avoid supporting any particular candidates or party, Cardinal Bo listed attributes voters should look for when picking their choice at the ballot box. These included an ability to work with “different ethnic groups and religions” and a willingness to safeguard the country’s natural resources, rather than “selling our sacred rivers … to foreign powers.”

Cardinal Bo told ucanews.com that he made his statements because Myanmar has reached a pivotal moment.

Ahead of the controversial religion laws being enacted, divisions were exacerbated when the government stripped about 800,000 Rohingya of “white cards” that previously handed them certain rights, including the right to vote. Then in September, the electoral commission disqualified the vast majority of Muslim candidates who had applied to run in the Nov. 8 election.

Such alienation, Cardinal Bo said, comes at a crucial point in Myanmar’s development.

“It’s time to let a new system run the country, so I vehemently urge people to embrace the opportunity to vote for worthy candidates as a sacred duty,” Cardinal Bo said. “It’s time to end old attitudes, old elites and the old system that has existed for five decades.”

He cited comments from St. John Paul II, who said that “diversity is strength” — something that shouldn’t be merely tolerated, but celebrated.

In December, the cardinal plans to return to his home village to celebrate his 25th year as bishop. There are Catholics in his village, of course, but also Buddhists.

“What I want to highlight is that Catholics and Buddhists in my native village have been living together as a harmonious society for centuries,” the cardinal said. “That’s the interreligious message that I want to share with the people of Myanmar.”