France’s Catholic Church pronounced a priest guilty of sexually abusing multiple Boy Scouts over several years and defrocked him last week, an unusually strong move that reflects France’s growing reckoning with clergy sex abuse. The ruling by a Church tribunal was the latest development in a case with repercussions that reached the highest levels of…
Francis gives St Peter’s bone fragments to Orthodox leader Pope Francis has unexpectedly given a reliquary containing what are believed to be bone fragments of St Peter to Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, an ecumenical gesture that has generated controversy among some Catholics. The Pope took the reliquary from the chapel in the papal apartments, where Pope…
Kentucky death penalty protocol ‘unconstitutional’ A Franklin County Circuit judge ruled last week that Kentucky’s death penalty regulations are unconstitutional because they fail to provide for an automatic stay of execution for intellectually disabled inmates. The Catholic Conference of Kentucky and Fr Patrick Delahanty, retired chair of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty,…
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Pope Francis at the Vatican today for a 55-minute private discussion. “Thank you for the time you have devoted to me,” Putin said after his audience with Pope Francis in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. It was Putin’s third meeting with Pope Francis and fifth visit to the Vatican. The…
An Ikea worker in Poland has filed a lawsuit after being fired last week for posting Bible verses opposing homosexual behaviour on the company’s intranet. Identified in local media as Tomasz K, the worker is suing after he was terminated from his position at the furniture store in Krakow. Poland Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro…
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said in an article published last Friday that the unity of the Church has always prevailed over internal struggles and affirmed that there is currently only one Pope. “The Pope is one, it is Francis,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said in an interview with an Italian magazine published by Corriere Della Sera…
The US Diocese of New Ulm has announced that it has reached a $34m (€30m) settlement with victims of clerical sexual abuse. “The settlement represents our commitment to finding a fair resolution for victims and survivors of sexual abuse while continuing our ministry for those we serve throughout south and west central Minnesota,” Bishop John…
The Vatican has told bishops and priests in China that they must follow their own consciences in deciding whether to register with the government, and it urged Catholics in the country not to judge them for the choices they make. The problem, the Vatican said, is that registration almost always requires the bishop or priest…
Pope Francis will declare Blessed John Henry Newman, the 19th-Century English cardinal, a saint on October 13. The English theologian will be canonised during a Mass at the Vatican along with a Swiss laywoman, an Indian nun, an Italian nun and a nun known as the “Mother Teresa of Brazil”. The date for the canonisation…
Bishops in the Ivory Coast have warned of a new civil war in the run-up to 2020 elections, unless urgent action is taken to ease communal tensions and withdraw weapons in West African state. “A general climate of fear now reigns throughout our population, linked to recurrent intercommunal conflicts, issues of insecurity, illicit forest occupation…