Two of the three young shepherd children who in 1917 saw the apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima will be canonised when Pope Francis visits the Portuguese town on May 13, the Pope has said. During an ordinary public consistory in the Vatican, the Pontiff announced the canonisation of a total of 35 people, most…

The Pope’s line on tackling persecution allows others to be more assertive, writes John L. Allen Jr. That there’s a rising tide of anti-Christian persecution around the world in the early 21st Century is an empirical fact. Christians are hardly the only ones facing threats, of course, but because of their numbers and the zones…

Iraqi Christians driven from the Nineven Plains by the so-called Islamic State are looking forward to moving home, with Church leaders having assembled a taskforce to spearhead a vast rebuilding programme. The Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, formed from bishops from the Syriac Catholic, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldean Catholic Churches, will oversee the planning and rebuilding of…

Venezuela’s bishops have described a Supreme Court decision to eliminate the country’s National Assembly as “morally unacceptable”. Saying Venezuela’s Catholics cannot remain “passive, frightened, or hopeless”, they have called for peaceful protests and civil disobedience to the government of President Nicholas Maduro. The abolition of the assembly, which opposition parties have dominated for over a…

Cardinal Raymond Burke once again has promised to “correct the situation” over what he believes to be confusion surrounding Pope Francis’ controversial 2016 document on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia. The American cardinal was speaking during a Q&A session after a presentation at Saint Raymond of Peñafort parish in Springfield, Virginia in the US.…

Pope Francis has approved the recognition of a miracle attributed to the intercession of two of the shepherd children who saw Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, thus paving the way for their canonisation. Pope Francis signed the decree for the causes of Blesseds Francisco and Jacinta Marto during a meeting March 23 with Cardinal…

While documentation regarding an alleged miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Oscar Romero is being studied at the Vatican, there is no date scheduled for his canonisation, the archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, said. “I must say, in all sincerity, that there is no date. And we understand it well because it involves…

The Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations has urged the international community to forge an enduring peace for Syria. As the conflict in the Middle Eastern nation reached its sixth anniversary in March, Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic told a sitting of the UN in Geneva that “six years of ongoing conflict indicate the failure…

The latest news is as grim as any emanating from the bloody battlefields of the Middle East currently dominating airtime with the international media. But this is Africa and, more specifically, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Thus, as embedded journalists in Iraq warned us to prepare for the worst as mass graves turned up amid…

A Chaldean Catholic church whose image announced the fall of Mosul in 2014 has been liberated. When so-called Islamic State (ISIS) swept through Iraq in June 2014, a ‘before-and-after’ picture of the Church of Our Mother of Perpetual help in Mosul emerged showing the crucifix topping the building replaced by the black banner of the…