Faith

Ever since his election two years ago, Baghdad’s Archbishop Louis Sako has not been one to mince words. Speaking at a symposium in Baghdad this weekend, Sako called for concrete action to effectively hamstring the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq.

Having lost the religious battle in Scandinavia to Christianity over 1,000 years ago, the Norse gods are making a comeback in Iceland.

In his morning homily at Mass Tuesday, Pope Francis once again insisted on the need for Christians to make time for prayer and Bible reading, putting aside other things.

While Italians express ever lower confidence in their own institutions and political representatives, their opinion of Pope Francis is the highest it has ever been, with 89.6% of Italians agreeing with the statement that the Pope is giving new impetus to the Catholic Church, according to a new report by Eurispes, a major Italian research institute.

In addressing a group of Lithuanian bishops Monday, Pope Francis made reference to their country’s recent full entry into the European Union. Instead of congratulating them, however, the Pope warned them of ideological threats to the family they would now be facing.

The 12-page working document for a Pontifical Council meeting, titled Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference, outlines the topics to be discussed, including gender identity and inequality, female poverty, violence against women, complementarity, generativity and the female body.

A guard walks inside the chapel of the former University of Santo Thomas of Villanueva in Havana, Cuba. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Pope gave further indications as to the content of his upcoming letter on the environment Saturday, as he addressed a group from the Italian National Farmers Confederation. Francis told his hearers that in their work of cultivating the land, they were responding to God’s commission “to till and keep” the earth.

When the hastily written interim report was read aloud before all the bishops gathered for the Vatican marriage summit last October, it was met with consternation and disapproval. At the time, it was generally assumed that Pope Francis had never seen the text, but now the Cardinal in charge of organizing the summit has claimed that the document was “seen and approved by the Pope.”

Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Archbishop of Aleppo in Syria, has decried what he calls a “plot” to empty the Middle East of Christians. ISIS has a special fear of Christians, he said, because theirs are “the only voices to reach the West.”

At his daily morning Mass Thursday, Pope Francis preached on false models of Christian living, warning his hearers against privatizing salvation and forming elite church cliques, rather than living as members of the people of God.

Pope Francis pulled off his kid gloves Wednesday, denouncing in the strongest terms what he called a “society without fathers.”

Though both China and the Vatican have made efforts in recent months to better diplomatic relations, Beijing’s recent announcement of its intention to ordain Catholic bishops in 2015 without the Pope’s approval is sure to extinguish whatever good will had been achieved.

This past Saturday afternoon, Pope Francis met with Diego Neria Lejárraga, a 48-year-old Spaniard who was born a girl but underwent a sex change operation eight years ago.

A papal tradition has come to a bizarre end. For years, popes have sent out white doves as a symbol of peace after an annual meeting with young people from the youth movement called Catholic Action.