Faith - Page 18

Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confessed on Friday, attending the first Islamic prayers at the Hagia Sophia in 86 years, that converting the ancient Christian cathedral to a mosque was his childhood dream.

Thousands of Muslim faithful gathered outside the historic Hagia Sophia site in Istanbul on Friday ready for the first prayers since Turkish authorities ruled the building’s rich Christian heritage could be overturned and the building reconverted into a mosque.

If we abandon Dr. King’s legacy, if we call riots “peaceful protest,” we will stop listening to one another, and settle our differences violently.

Sheffield Cathedral has announced it will close down its current choir to ready itself “for the exciting future of the mixed urban community in which we live and work.”

The former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, is facing possible legal action after he said that the party’s legal settlement with antisemitism whistleblowers gave “credibility to misleading and inaccurate allegations”.

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick ran a sex abuse ring of underage boys at a New Jersey shore house, according to a recent lawsuit.

ROME — The number of officially recorded anti-Christian incidents in France has risen by 285 percent between 2008 and 2019, according to Ellen Fantini, director of the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE).

Joe Biden told a Muslim group on Monday he wishes schools would teach more about the “Islamic faith.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the Hagia Sophia on Sunday shortly before the newly reconverted mosque opens to Muslim prayer on Friday, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The world Jewish population stands at 14,410,700, a new report from the Diaspora Affairs ministry said Monday, but added some 80 percent of Jews outside Israel do not feel connected to their Jewish identity.

Millionaire financier Raffaele Mincione has filed two claims against the Holy See at the UK High Court over the Vatican’s purchase of 60 Sloane Avenue, a prime Chelsea property slated for development into luxury apartments.

The Jesuit Post is urging the imposition of a U.S. carbon tax to “disincentivize” the use of fossil fuels and “generate revenue” to address the negative effects of climate change.

Unidentified thieves broke into the northern French church of Saint-Léonard last week and stole the relics of the 8th-century Saint Boniface, French media report.

Chinese communist authorities have ordered poor Christian villagers to remove Christian images from their homes and replace them with portraits of Chairman Mao and President Xi Jinping.

Catholic churches across North America suffered a devastating week of vandalism and arson from July 10-16, according to a report from the Aleteia news agency.

The battle between good and evil is at the heart of the Christian life, Pope Francis told pilgrims Sunday, which means resisting the devil, God’s “quintessential opponent.”

Italian cemetery workers were caught on CCTV dismembering bodies of the recently deceased as part of a scam that offered a supposed cheap alternative to cremation.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is leveraging economic restraints caused by the coronavirus pandemic to coerce increasingly desperate, low-income Chinese Christians to renounce their faith or lose welfare benefits, human rights magazine Bitter Winter reported on Friday.

“St. Joseph’s Church … was vandalized this week, as an unknown individual or individuals painted ‘satanic’ and ‘anarchist’ symbols on its doors,” reports the New Haven Register.

Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Ministry says it is setting up “a new museum” to house the Hagia Sophia’s “portable icons and Holy relics” indicating that the former cathedral’s Christian relics and iconography will be removed from the site, the Greek City Times reported Friday.

During a Senate hearing in 1991, then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) lectured a black pastor who called out politicians for pandering to his church congregation during election seasons.

U.S. Jewry is in a “dangerous place in history,” former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said in an interview, and he recommended that the heavy security measures in place for European synagogues be adopted by Jewish houses of worship in the U.S.

A statue depicting Jesus Christ has been found decapitated inside a South Florida church, leaving congregants of the house of worship shaken.

Russian authorities have detained a man in western Siberia “on suspicion of setting up a cell” of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious group, considered an “extremist” organization under Russian law, state-run news agency TASS reported on Wednesday.

“The Chattanooga Police Department is investigating after someone vandalized a 5-foot tall statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the St. Stephen Catholic Church,” reports local media.

Amman — Jordan’s top court has dissolved the country’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist movement, an official said Thursday, citing the group’s failure to “rectify its legal status”.

A group of Catholics turned out Wednesday evening to pray the Rosary at the site of a Virgin Mary statue that had been set ablaze over the weekend outside of St. Peter Parish in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.

Evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump will be greater in 2020’s presidential election than in 2016, predicted Jerry Falwell Jr.

The removal of monuments and statues across America is part of a broader “Marxist takeover” involving elected officials, stated Marc Little.

Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) announced in a Tuesday statement that it would cover up images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ in the Hagia Sophia, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, now that it has been converted into a mosque.

With the silent approval of the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, and the corporate media, our Christian churches are under attack, and I fear this is only the beginning.

A Yazidi family found what they believe are four of their elderly relatives in a mass grave in the front yard of their former home, local officials revealed this weekend.

The 2020 Democrat candidates have continued the party’s radical lurch leftward on abortion, initiated in 2016 with nominee Hillary Clinton, and now confirmed by Joe Biden’s joint Unity Task Force plan with socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Two statues of the Virgin Mary were reportedly vandalized over the weekend in Boston, Massachusetts, and Queens, New York.

Hundreds gathered Saturday to grieve over what remained of California’s 249-year-old San Gabriel Mission, founded by St. Junípero Serra, after a fire engulfed the historic church in the early hours of the morning.

God is calling for more racial diversity in the Church of England (CoE), Britain’s second most senior cleric has claimed, insisting that Christians must stand up “to denounce prejudice, racism, homophobia, and exclusion of any kind”.