The archbishop of Minsk prayed outside of a prison in Belarus where detained protesters were reported to have been tortured. With a rosary in his hands, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz [pictured] walked the streets in front of the Akrestsin Street pre-trial detention centre at 3pm on August 19, reported the website of the Catholic Church in…
The Colombian Bishops’ Conference appealed for peace following two brutal massacres of young people last week in the country. In a statement, the bishops expressed their “deep grief and concern” over the killings. “We pray to God for the victims and we express our closeness and solidarity with their families, the inhabitants of the cities…
A restoration project at a country house in Norfolk, England has uncovered items that shed new light on the steadfast faith of a Catholic family in the wake of the English Reformation. The discoveries include a fragment of a 15th-Century illuminated manuscript found by a builder in the eaves of Oxburgh Hall, a moated manor…
Academy unveils effort to fight Mafia’s ‘deviant spirituality’ of Mary Given the many criminal organisations and gangs worldwide that have distorted the true role and image of Mary, a pontifical academy has unveiled a new department dedicated to fighting “this deviant spirituality”. The Pontifical Marian International Academy will be working with the Italian government and law enforcement…
WHO leader supports Pope’s call for fair access to vaccine The head of the World Health Organization, which has been strongly advocating rapid, fair, and equitable access to potential Covid-19 vaccines worldwide, has voiced support for Pope Francis’ similar call for global protections. The Pope made appeals both on Twitter and at his weekly general…
A senior Catholic aid worker said humanitarian conditions are deteriorating in eastern Ukraine and urged Western governments and Churches not to forget the continuing six-year conflict. “We thought we’d overcome war in Europe, but a whole growing generation here now knows only war – teenagers who look like teenagers everywhere, but will tell you how…
Jesuit Fr James Martin will deliver an invocation at the Democratic National Convention this week where former Vice President Joe Biden will accept his party’s formal nomination for president of the United States. Fr Martin, an editor-at-large at America Magazine and one of the most well-known American priests on social media, will also be joined by a rabbi and an…
Church bells and the Muslim call to prayer sounded on August 11 to mark a minute of silence for those who perished in the explosion devastating much of Beirut and its port a week earlier. The port, badly damaged by a deadly explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, resumed partial operations. But the same…
Cardinal Maurice Piat of Port-Louis, Mauritius, has praised public responses to an oil spill that devastated the island’s coastline, as one prominent lay Catholic demanded “honest information” about the disaster. “Numerous families are afflicted by a pestilential and persistent odor – fishermen and all those living from the sea are suffering particularly, while ecological treasures…
Church leaders in Bangladesh have launched a campaign to plant 400,000 trees across the country to mark the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, the golden jubilee of the country’s independence and the birth centenary of the nation’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bishops led by Cardinal Patrick D’Rozario of Dhaka Archdiocese inaugurated the…