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POPE FRANCIS HAS deplored the suffering of migrants, victims of racism and persecuted Christians as 20,000 worshippers gathered at Rome’s Colosseum to hear his Good Friday prayer.
“Christ, our only saviour, we turn towards you this year with eyes lowered in shame,” the Pope told the crowds outside the former gladiators’ battleground, their faces lit by candlelight.
“Shame for all the images of devastation, destruction and shipwrecks which have become ordinary in our lives,” Francis said in an apparent reference to Mediterranean migrant disasters that have left at least 590 people feared people dead this year.
The Pope also spoke of the child abuse scandals that have rocked Catholicism in recent years, expressing “shame for all the times when bishops, priests and the religious have scandalised and hurt” the Church.
“Shame for the innocent blood, spilt daily, of women, children, migrants, people persecuted for the colour of their skin or for their social or ethnic group, or for their faith in you,” he said.
The Easter holy week commemorating the last days of Jesus’s life had a bloody beginning last Sunday with attacks claimed by the Islamic State group on two Coptic churches in Egypt that left 45 people dead.
Egyptian Copts observed a solemn Good Friday with prayers and fasting, as the community reeled from the bombings. Despite concerns over security, Francis is planning to go ahead with a visit to the country later this month.
In Rome, security was tight for the night-time ceremony, with road blocks and metal detectors in place as worshippers gathered to hear the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics. Three thousand officers were deployed to protect the Colosseum.
This year an Egyptian couple and their three young daughters carried a large cross for part of the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) procession, descending through the Colosseum and then outside into the crowd.
Worshippers from Portugal and Colombia, two countries the pontiff is set to visit in May and September respectively, also took part in the procession, taking turns to carry the cross along with two Chinese Christians.
A small group of believers carry a cross between 14 “stations” evoking the hours in the run-up to Jesus’s crucifixion during the Via Crucis procession.
Francis, 80, sat under his traditional red canopy next to a large cross lit with torchlight for the ceremony, which for the first time included a meditation written by a secular woman, French professor Anne-Marie Pelletier.
Good Friday is the second of four important days in the Christian calendar beginning with Holy Thursday and culminating in Easter Sunday, which commemorates Christ’s resurrection.
Call it what you like, it’ll still be the same old dinosaur with the same terrible attitude to competition and customers alike.
10yrs with sky. 1 phone call to customer care. 6mths with Eircom, over 25 calls and 10 different engineers have called to the house. Most are from companies where the work has been sub contracted to them. All are as useless as the last. Sorry I ever left sky.
The best those over paid Gob**ites can come up with is a rebrand !! Huw about not leaving your customers hanging on the line for 2hrs when they ring up to report a fault !!!
Messed about by so call customer care, Moved to UPC 1 year ago no issues.
It’s alright if your able to get upc , but not all of Ireland is covered.
just wait till you try to cancel. atrocious service. look at the Twitter
Eircom are a joke. Two complaints to Comreg regarding there shabby broadband. Moved to SKY and no problems with my broadband since. People are sick to the back teeth of companies like Eircom with their half price offers for their half baked services.
the ‘Only’ ‘Free’ ‘Just’ services. be sick of them. nothing is just, only, free. its all crap.
look rebranding wont change anything bar the name…in general “if it looks like sh!t smells like sh!t its usually sh!t”
The telecoms regulator seems pretty useless and overwhelmed by everything
They need to take firm action again Eircom when they mess their customers around
Only way to change the Eircom culture
left sky a few years ago to join eircom. what a mistake. rejoined sky again recently. Eircoms customer service was brutal. No manners, unprofessional and didn’t give a toss. sky might be more expensive but the quality is second to none. Never again using eircom
You can put a fairy on it and cover it in lights, but it’s still a tree.
I’m sure it will be a suitably shite branding effort by a bad marketing team that will waste money, pat themselves on the back and push the company further into the debt.
The creation of eMobile to differentiate it from Meteors downmarket image had to be the worse, least creative, no clear message, creation of a brand that just wasted masses of cash…
Sooo glad to be away from eircom. Ever since I’d been with them there’s been nothing but problems.
A turd in a tuxedo is still a turd.
One of the worst companies i ve ever dealth with.
The area where my parents live was supposed to get efiber in January, then June, then July, now September! They throttled the line into the exchange and did sod all about another exchange even though they knew there was a problem. Sky were more than helpful in trying to sort out speed issues but couldn’t do that much because Eircom ultimately run the lines. The biggest holdup to top rate broadband in this country is Eircom who have held us back by years. If you live in a big city or town you are sorted, the rest of the country doesn’t matter in Eircoms eyes.
I will be rebranding my anger and disdain in response.
Any telecoms company that offers a service that runs 24 hours a day, ie. Broadband, should have a 24hour customer care line, with people who can speak clear English.
All operators resell Eircom lines, so it all comes back in the end
Sky use BT Ireland to provide their service but in the end its Eircom who service the call.
No matter what you call it, it’s still the same shite, never have and never will use eircon
Eir is the new brand name.
Lennie – surely it couldn’t be that corny?? Eir?
has nobody told them that people read the small print now? how can people come out of a recession with their wages still cut in s*** and ye expect us to pay your overpriced ripoff service? i mean €80 for 2 months tv/broadband, thats insane. change your name, do what ye like, your marketing people are deluded if they think a name change can change peoples will to spend what they don’t have.
Their marketing departments have always been deluded, you see what passes for advertising or customer promotions with those guys? They think this stuff is dynamite.. Only a deluded person could ever think that.
Answer then better to improve there broadband services rather than pay millions on new logo .Ask some them engineers we can’t understand when we ring with problem to give it a new name then no one will know who to blame then because no can every make out there saying.
Are you sure it’s not the customer service people that can’t understand what YOU’RE saying?
The government needs to step in and separate Eircom the service provider from Eircom the engineering and line installers. They can’t be trusted to install lines and do service calls for other operators, they’ve been shown to give priority to their own customers first. There needs to be a completely independent engineer company that can handle service call outs and line installs for all the operators without giving priority or just being flat out sh!t
Changing the brand won’t make a fig of a difference. A brand change is not a magic wand. You’ve got to fix the problems first, then when you’re beginning to operate properly you can begin to think about a brand change.
Eircom have many issues to sort out. The company should be ashamed of itself that it allowed the company to sink so low. Very very bad management obviously.
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