Tag: Catholic Church

According to Bishop Jacek Pyl, the Vatican does not officially recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and still considers his diocese as part of the Catholic Church in Ukraine.

In 2006, Father Basel Yaldo was kidnapped in his native Iraq by Islamist extremists and endured three days of fierce beatings. Even after being released, he continued to receive death threats, and was eventually sent to the United States in 2007 for his own safety. Last month, Yaldo returned to Iraq and, on Friday, was ordained a bishop in Baghdad. He will stay there to serve the Iraqi people.

Pope Francis’ reform of the Vatican departments, one of the priorities of his pontificate, seems to be nearing completion. The 165 Cardinals in Rome for meetings with Francis were briefed Thursday on a proposal to shrink the Vatican Curia, merging several existing departments into just two.

During his General Audience Wednesday, Pope Francis continued his reflections on the family, focusing this week on children. The Pope said that a society’s attitude toward children tells a lot about it, and explains why many European societies that don’t value children are “depressed.”

In a meeting with representatives of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) on Saturday, Pope Francis reminded his hearers that the future is in the hands of the young, who need to be protected from “new and unscrupulous forms of colonization,” such as the reckless pursuit of riches, as well as “fundamentalism and the distorted use of religion.”

A plenary meeting of Iraqi bishops in Baghdad on Saturday has resulted in an important joint declaration calling on all “national and international forces to unite their efforts” to liberate territories occupied by ISIS and to “exercise the necessary influence” to provide protection for Christians and other Iraqis returning to their homes, enabling them to live in security and dignity.

In a visit to a Roman parish Sunday, Pope Francis blamed family divisions on the devil, adding that the only cure is Jesus.

The most common complaint about the way the Catholic Church handled the 2001 sex abuse crisis was not the way it dealt with victims or with offending priests, but the way it dealt with bishops who were seen as either complicit or culpably negligent. Now the Vatican seems poised to change that.

After his weekly Angelus prayer on Sunday, Pope Francis paused to reflect on what he called the “shameful plague” of human trafficking, encouraging greater efforts to eradicate this form of modern slavery. February 8 marks the Catholic feast day of

The Latin Times calls newly declared Catholic martyr Oscar Arnulfo Romero a “Marxist Martyr” because of supposed ties to a Marxist-inspired movement called liberation theology that was popular in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

In his homily at Mass this morning, Pope Francis said that the Church has to keep going back to the heart of its mission of evangelizing and comforting those who suffer, or it runs the risk of becoming just a philanthropic organization or an NGO.

Two high-ranking Vatican officials who were slated to address the national assembly of India’s Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCBI) in Bangalore this week have been denied visas by the Indian government.

As fighting intensifies in the Ukraine, Pope Francis took advantage of his world pulpit to plead for a ceasefire and a return to dialogue.

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.

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.

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.”