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.
Pope Francis believes that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed “the best and worst” of each person, and that now more than ever, it’s important to recognize that the crisis can only be overcome by searching for the common good.
According to one Venezuelan bishop, the world should be concerned by the growing military presence of Iran in his country.
Members of the Nigerian Igbo community at St. Fortunata parish in East New York, Brooklyn, cry out against persecutions of Catholics and other Christian denominations in their homeland.
