The Catholic church of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Venice has been provisionally transformed into a mosque for the seven-month period of the Biennale festivities in the northern Italian city.
In an effort to protect the strategic Beiji oil refinery from Islamic State forces, the U.S. has carried out 26 airstrikes since Tuesday, according to Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
ROME, Italy—As the number of illegal African migrants leaving from Libyan shores reaches biblical proportions, the coast guard in the Libyan port of Zuwarah finds itself distressingly unprepared, as it has just one old boat in its entire fleet.
In his morning Mass Thursday, Pope Francis insisted on God’s nearness to humanity, noting that it was an early Christian heresy that saw Him as far away and abstract, instead of the “God with us” of the visible, tangible Christ.
For the first time in history, Pakistani history books for middle and high school students will describe the role that Christians, Hindus and Sikhs have had in building the country after independence.
Religious leaders seem desperate to hide behind “bland statements of anaemic intent” about what they have in common rather than facing up to the “profound differences” between them, said Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who called the practice “dishonest.”
Proponents of stricter Islamic regulations in Indonesia have scored another victory with the passage of sharia measures mandating the separation of sexes in educational institutions and certain social situations.
As more and more countries enact laws permitting same-sex marriage, Pope Francis devoted his weekly “general audience” to the topic of Christian matrimony, distinguishing it from the merely social institution of marriage in its diverse forms and insisting that the life of the Church “deteriorates” whenever marriage “is disfigured.”
The U.S. State Department’s recent rejection of an Iraqi nun’s request for a visa has ignited a firestorm, with conservatives calling for an official congressional probe into the decision.
Christians are called to bear trials and tribulations with courage and patience, but this does not mean they are masochists, Pope Francis said Tuesday morning.
An uninterrupted flood of illegal immigrants continues to issue forth from Africa into Italy, with this past weekend’s count now nearing 6,000 refugees.
An enormous wave of African migrants seeking to cross the Strait of Sicily into Italy this weekend has created a state of emergency for Italian rescuers, with the Coast Guard bringing in 3,690 refugees in a single day from 17
In a candid interview, Nigerian bishop Emmanuel Badejo has responded bluntly to Hillary Clinton’s recent assertion that religious beliefs “have to be changed” in order to give women access to reproductive health care.
Indian officials expressed intense indignation over the 2015 report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), saying it reflected ignorance of India and its culture and calling it “a conspiracy to tarnish the image of the country.”
In a startling new interview, a 3-star general and former head of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978, claims that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the continent.
In a meeting with Christian laypeople Thursday, Pope Francis explained a confusing schedule mix-up by appealing to his fallibility in daily activities.
The Pope’s stand in favor of women’s equality and against abortion may earn him the ire of the reigning feminist regime, but it seems he has history on his side.
The independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has released its Annual Report for 2015, documenting religious freedom violations in 33 countries and assessing the U.S. government’s implementation of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).
All but one of the members of an Iraqi delegation of minority groups—comprising representatives of the Yazidi and Turkmen Shia religious communities—have been granted visas to come for official meetings in Washington. The lone member denied a visa was the only Iraqi Christian in the group, a Catholic nun.
A new study claims that Pope Francis is the most influential person on Twitter for the third year in a row, and his influence is growing steadily. Although U.S. President Barack Obama has more followers than any other world leader, Pope Francis is the most retweeted leader, which counts more for “influence,” according to the criteria used by the study.
While climate change activists busily campaigned the Pope for support for their projects, Francis’s mind was elsewhere, reflecting on the importance of traditional marriage and the plight of women in the world.
A group of like-minded thinkers meeting at the Vatican for a workshop on climate change have issued a final statement, making a series of bold proclamations on the environment and issuing an alarming ultimatum that the climate summit in Paris later this year “may be the last effective opportunity” to keep global warming from reaching “devastating” levels.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), in what it claims is a conservative estimate, has reported that in the ten months since the establishment of its so-called “Caliphate,” the Islamic State has executed 2154 people.
Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev received his Syrian counterpart Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaar in Moscow on Monday, where the two ministers signed a cooperation agreement to combat Islamic terrorism.
Rev. Bruno Ateba, bishop of the Diocese of Maroua-Mokolo in Cameroon, complained in a letter this week that the world pays very little attention to the sufferings of Africans in comparison with treatment accorded to victims in the First World.
