Rome, Italy, Jan 24, 2022 / 17:00 pm
Cardinal Michael Czerny on Monday led a prayer service for Tonga, after an underwater volcanic eruption caused a devastating tsunami earlier this month.
“Tonga is a little known name, and for us it is a distant reality. Yet, those who suffer are never far from us who in Jesus recognize ourselves as ‘children always loved’ by the Father, called to share together with the human family a unique destiny, in the common home that is the earth,” Cardinal Czerny said Jan. 24 in Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.
Seen in satellite images from space, scientists have called the volcanic blast in the South Pacific on Jan. 15 the largest eruption in the world in three decades.
Some of the archipelago’s outlying islands were hit by 49-foot-high waves which destroyed homes, the Associated Press reported on Jan. 19.