Pope Francis has said that Asia would be a priority in his pontificate, and he will be visiting the region again next month, when he visits Japan and Thailand in November. The pontiff has spoken about a desire in his youth to serve as a missionary in Asia, but he never got the opportunity with the Jesuits.
The global ecological crisis is just one of the effects of a distorted and diseased view people have of the world, themselves and each other, Pope Francis said in a new book.
While the Amazon region has been the focus of this month’s Vatican meeting of bishops, one of the Americans taking part says he hopes the gathering’s reverberations will be felt in the United States.
A new report says Christians are faring better in conflict-ravaged regions in the Middle East, but the precarious situation means the Church could vanish in places like Syria and Iraq if the Islamic State mounted another campaign in the region.
Catholic bishops are not fully utilizing Church law to maximize the role of women in decision making capacities, Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai said on Oct. 23.
As the Vatican’s meeting on the Amazon draws to a close this week, one group is using the occasion to seek new roles for women in leadership, hosting a prayer vigil on Oct. 23 in support of women’s ordination to the priesthood and the diaconate.
Monsignor Peter Vaccari, currently rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, New York, has been elected to succeed Monsignor John E. Kozar as president of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association/Pontifical Mission for Palestine.
An indigenous organization has denounced the theft and destruction of wooden statue of a naked pregnant woman from a Church in Rome on October 21.
Perhaps no place on earth serves as exhibit A for Pope Francis’s call to “resist the throwaway culture” better than Cairo’s Manshiyat Nasser neighborhood, where residents recycle an estimated 90 percent of the city’s trash.
A wood carving statue of a naked pregnant woman that has been at the heart of brewing controversies since before the Vatican’s major summit on the Amazon region began was stolen from a Roman Church on October 21 and tossed in the Tiber River.
