It has been six months since Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned the UNESCO world heritage site Hagia Sophia (the cathedral built by Emperor Justinian I in 532) into a mosque and four months since he made a similar conversion of the historic Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora.
On March 7, Pope Francis concluded a three-day whirlwind tour of Iraq that took him to six cities, saw him deliver seven speeches, and marked several historic firsts.
Abdullah Kurdi, the father of the young refugee boy who death five years ago woke the world up to the reality of the migration crisis, has described his recent meeting with Pope Francis as the best birthday present that he’s ever received.
From his experience in Iraq in 2018, Monsignor Kieran Harrington doesn’t look at one stop, or moment, from Pope Francis’ trip to Iraq as most significant. Rather, it’s the fact that the Holy Father was there in the first place.
“Are there any women prophets in your book?” That’s the question that stuck with Kieran Larkin, a religious studies teacher at The Mary Louis Academy, after he published his first book, “Messengers of God: A Survey of Old Testament Prophets,” in 2019. Having written about male prophets who were chosen by God to deliver messages of encouragement or condemnation — like Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah — Larkin did a deep dive into the few “prophetesses” mentioned in Scripture.
March 8 marks the end of Pope Francis’ emblematic trip to Iraq — it’s been filled with many firsts for the only pontiff to visit the Land of Abraham. There were places to go, people to meet, stories to tell and, of course, lessons on human fraternity to learn. Here’s a look at some of the highlights.
In his latest in-flight news conference, Pope Francis said Monday he’s not afraid to be called a ‘heretic’ for engaging in dialogue with Muslims; that he felt “imprisoned” during COVID-19 lockdowns; he was “shocked” by the destruction he witnessed in the Iraqi city of Mosul March 7; and, on international Women’s Day, expressed regret over the exploitation of women, including the practice of genital mutilation.
Although the impact of papal trips is often hard to assess in the immediate aftermath, such cautions mean little to the leader of Iraq’s local Catholic church, who quickly proclaimed Pope Francis’s March 5-8 visit to his nation a “miracle” on Sunday.
In 2016, an Egyptian court sentenced four Coptic Christian teenagers to five years in prison after they appeared in a 32-second video mocking ISIS, which authorities said was an insult to Islam.
“A land of infidels” is how Boko Haram’s leader described the Kano state of north-central Nigeria. Last year, an Islamic recording artist received a death sentence there for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
