The pontificate of Pope Francis with his emphasis on poverty has resulted in a new tone of austerity in Vatican circles, with clerics avoiding any show of ostentation in favor of a new sobriety in dress, transportation and manners. Francis
The Nigerian army announced Sunday night that it succeeded in freeing 178 Boko Haram hostages, including 101 children, captured a commander of the radical Islamist group, and destroyed several rebel camps during a military operation.
In his two years as Roman Pontiff, Pope Francis has become known as the Pope of the poor and disenfranchised, but in his Angelus message Sunday he reminded his hearers of the predominance of the spiritual over material life, saying
The national parliament of Chad has unanimously approved a rigorous anti-terrorism bill that reintroduces the death penalty just six months after its abolition.
Alarmed over the growth of local Satanic cults, a Catholic priest from Salerno has performed an aerial exorcism of the entire southern Italian town of Castellammare di Stabia from a helicopter.
Boko Haram militants slit the throats of sixteen Christian fishermen on the shores of Lake Chad in the Nigerian state of Borno.
According to official data, the average cost of foodstuffs in Russia increased by 14.3 percent in the first half of this year, largely because of the embargo of Western products. In late June, Putin announced his decision to extend the embargo on perishable food products from the European Union for one year, in response to the extension of the sanctions taken by Brussels against Moscow for its role in the crisis in Ukraine.
Chinese officials in Wenzhou, a city of the Zhejiang province with a high concentration of Christians, have given Christian communities a deadline to remove rooftop crosses from their churches, but some of the local pastors have responded with defiance, placing guards at their churches to defend the crosses.
Father Joseph Zhang Yinlin will be ordained Bishop of Anyang, Henan Province, on August 4, becoming the first Chinese bishop ordained publicly in three years and the first after the Vatican and China reopened dialogue in June 2014.
Adding to Rome’s worst July heat wave in recorded history is a series of delays on public transportation due to strikes, along with no union agreement for the upcoming Jubilee Year in which some 33 million pilgrims are expected to visit the Eternal City.
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, the Archbishop of Lima, urged government officials gathered for a Mass earlier this week to reject “ideological colonization” by those who wish to impose abortion and gender ideology on the country.
The most recent example is the inclusion of “humanism” as a religion in federal prisons, with the corresponding rights to time and space for activities, visits by humanist chaplains and access to literature and study materials. Often used as a code word for atheism, humanism, or “secular humanism,” refers to a unifying philosophy of life that seeks meaning in human events without reference to spiritual or non-material realities.
A devil-worshipping group calling itself the Satanic Temple has been working to raise funds to promote abortion-on-demand and to counter legal efforts such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and 20-week abortion bans.
During his visit, Obama condemned Kenya’s outlawing of homosexual acts as “wrong—full stop,” comparing Kenya’s policy toward gays to the treatment of blacks in the United States prior to the civil rights movement.
A Satanic reproductive rights group is promising to unveil a one-ton bronze statue of a goat-headed Baphomet Saturday in Detroit, in a private ceremony open only to bearers of $25 tickets.
Despite repeated threats, local police seem powerless to stop tourists from taking a plunge into Roman fountains in one of Rome’s hottest summers on record.
A two-day Vatican workshop on climate change and human trafficking came to a close Wednesday after a like-minded group of some 60 mayors from around the world met with Church officials and United Nations representatives to discuss a coordinated response to environmental challenges.
From his election in April 2013, Pope Francis had steadily gained approval among US citizens, starting at a modest 58 percent and slowly but inexorably climbing to 76 percent in February 2014 and culminating in a high of 78 percent at the end of that year. The moral capital Francis had built up seems to have fallen precipitously in recent months, and his approval rating now languishes at just 59 percent, barely more than what it was just after his election.
California Governor Jerry Brown mounted his bully pulpit at the Vatican Tuesday, citing the Bible and excoriating climate change skeptics as greedy swindlers more interested in profits from oil than the well-being of humanity.
In his speech on Saturday, during which he derided the “arrogant U.S. government” and made his first public comments on the agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was holding what appeared to be an assault rifle, yet no mainstream media outlet thought to mention it.
In 2014, the Catholic Church in Germany lost a greater number of faithful than in any previous year in its history for which there are records: 218,000 people– 39,000 more than the previous year.
At last week’s annual NAACP convention in Philadelphia, one pastor protested the group’s support for legal abortion, using a huge, attention-grabbing poster of the confederate flag side by side with the picture of an aborted child.
According to a recent AP-GFK poll, support for gay marriage among U.S. citizens has dropped six percentage points since their last poll in April, with more Americans disapproving of the Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage the law of the land than those approving it.
Provincial authorities in Zhejiang have confiscated the official seal of the local Christian Council, which is necessary to issue valid official documents, after the council released a statement earlier this month criticizing the government campaign to remove church crosses.
Hundreds of people have been killed in attacks by the jihadist group Boko Haram and in sectarian violence in the Middle Belt during the past two months, and emphasizes the intensification of Boko Haram attacks since the start of Ramadan. “The July 20 meeting in Washington D.C. between President Barack Obama and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari offers both nations the opportunity to reinvigorate their commitment to, and develop initiatives that would, help curb both types of violence,” the statement says.
