Mexican church and civic officials have canceled public feast celebrations for Mexico’s patroness at her shrine in Mexico City due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The celebration normally attracts 10 million pilgrims to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the world’s most-visited Marian shrine.
Despite restrictions on hate speech on social media in Spain, a trending hashtag calling for Catholic priests to be burned alive was not removed for violating rules against posting calls for violence.
Pope Francis’ decision to move the local celebrations of World Youth Day from Palm Sunday to the feast of Christ the King addresses the pastoral needs of local churches, said Father Joao Chagas, head of the youth section of the Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life.
The Chinese foreign ministry dismissed Pope Francis’ criticism of China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs as groundless. In a new book to be released next month, “Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future,” the pontiff said that he often thinks of “persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi.”
In that brief intermezzo over the summer between what turned out to be the first and second great surges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pope Francis held a series of appropriately socially distanced, “virtual” conversations with his premier English-language explicator about what he believes needs to be done for the world to be better than it was before the crisis.
James Cyprian lives in Brooklyn, but his mind is often thousands of miles away in his native Pakistan — worrying about his two adult children’s safety. “They are always on my mind,” said Cyprian, secretary-general of the Brooklyn-based Pakistani Christian Association of USA.
Within the last few days, two completely separate lawsuits have been filed in two different countries that somehow involve the Vatican.
A delegation representing the National Basketball Players Association, a union representing professional athletes from the NBA, met with Pope Francis and spoke with him about their work in promoting social justice.
Members of the Armenian community in Brooklyn criticize a recent ceasefire agreement between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan in a decades-old dispute over the mountainous region called Nagorno-Karabakh. They said the deal brokered by Russia lets Azeris keep control over land they seized when fighting resumed n late September. They also worry that unresolved issues might cause warfare to start up again.
At an event at the U.S. embassy to the Holy See responding to a rising tide of anti-Semitism in various parts of the world, the Vatican’s current Cardinal Secretary of State revealed that one of his predecessors, a full 25 years before the Holocaust erupted in Nazi Germany, vowed solidarity with the “children of Israel” in a letter to an influential American Jewish group on the basis of defending human dignity.
