Cardinal Kurt Koch January 5 and 6 marked the 60th anniversary of the meeting in Jerusalem between Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras. It was the first meeting between a pope and an ecumenical patriarch since the one between Pope Eugene IV and Patriarch Joseph II during the Council of Ferrara (1438-1439). This important…
Six nuns from the Congregation of the Sisters of St Anne were kidnapped January 19 while traveling on a bus in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, according to the Haitian Conference of Religious. Other passengers on the bus also were taken in the abduction, the conference said in a statement. “These many kidnappings fill the consecrated…
In a new attack against the Catholic Church and other Christians in Nicaragua, the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has cancelled the legal personhood of several religious congregations and evangelical groups. On January 16, the Ministry of the Interior published in the official government newspaper La Gaceta the…
My friend and colleague Carl Trueman recently observed that “the West is no longer a consortium of serious cultures”. To which I am sorely tempted to add, “…or serious polities”. The two are connected, the cultural decay of the West being a not-insignificant factor in our descent into political infantilism. The exploration of that connection…
Dakar (KNA) Human rights activists have called on Senegal to comply with fair conditions for the presidential election on 25 February. Instead, Senegal’s authorities are cracking down on the opposition, media and civil society in the run-up to the elections, criticised the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday. According to the opposition…
Warsaw (KNA) The Catholic Church in Poland is intervening in the conflict between two imprisoned politicians from the right-wing conservative opposition party PiS and the new government in Warsaw. The Bishops’ Conference announced on Wednesday evening that its chairman, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki, had written to both politicians offering to lobby Justice Minister Adam Bodnar for…
Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa has been released from prison and sent into exile along with 18 imprisoned churchmen as the Nicaraguan government expelled its most prominent critic, whose presence behind bars bore witness to the Sandinista regime’s descent into totalitarianism, along with its unrelenting persecution of the Catholic Church. Vatican News confirmed on January 14 at…
Amid an unprecedented wave of violence in Ecuador, the South American country’s bishops’ conference issued a statement asking the people to unite against the disturbance caused by criminal gangs, whose operations were defined as acts of “treason against the nation”. The incidents began after José Adolfo Macías Villamar, the leader of the criminal gang Los…
LEICESTER, United Kingdom – Mary McAleese, the former president of the Republic of Ireland, has backed calls for the Catholic Church to end priestly celibacy. McAleese, currently chancellor of Trinity University, spoke to The Irish News after Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who also serves as an adjunct secretary of the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Doctrine…
Berlin (KNA) The German Child Protection Association has criticised Pope Francis for his comments on the beating of children. “There is no justification for beating children, not even a papal one,” said Daniel Grein, Federal Director of the Child Protection Association, in Berlin on Tuesday. Anyone who physically abuses a child is doing the wrong…
George Weigel