For all intents and purposes they’ve been sworn enemies for five years, each in charge of one side of a bloody civil war that theoretically ended last year with a “revitalized” peace agreement – a deal that few observers believe will hold up for very long – installing one as president and the other vice-president of South Sudan.
When she first heard that Pope Francis wanted her to write the meditations for the world’s most followed Way of the Cross ceremony, Italian Sister Eugenia Bonetti said she was “embarrassed” but soon realized that it could be a “great opportunity.”
Within the universal Christian vocation of serving God and serving others, God handcrafts a specific calling for each person, a vocation that fits his or her personality and abilities, Pope Francis said.
Pope Francis will celebrate the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper with prisoners in Velletri, about 36 miles south of Rome.
Many churches in Canada are closing their doors because of declining finances amid low numbers of worshipers. But Michael Haddad, an immigrant Catholic from Egypt, recently put up more than $300,000 to keep open the United Church in Hensall, Ontario, for its older worshippers.
Perhaps illustrating part of the logic for a new “ministerial” on religious freedom, meaning a gathering of government representatives at the minister’s level to be hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in July, U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Callista Gingrich says it’s critical that China be pressured to clean up its act.
President Donald Trump’s decision to build an anti-immigrant wall will leave the United States alone and a “prisoner” of its own isolation, according to Pope Francis in his latest wide-ranging interview, this time with a Spanish journalist.
The life of a young person and the vocation to which God calls each one is “holy ground” that pastors and parents must respect, nurture and encourage, Pope Francis wrote in a new apostolic exhortation.
In a major new document on young people, Pope Francis acknowledges the clerical sexual abuse crisis as a major challenge to the Catholic Church’s credibility, but, following the lead of a summit of bishops last fall upon which it’s based, notably omits any reference to a “zero tolerance” policy.
In what’s rapidly becoming the new papal normal, on the first day of his visit to Morocco, Pope Francis once again surprised friends and foes alike by signing an appeal that wasn’t on his schedule, this time on Jerusalem – calling for the city to be preserved as a “patrimony of humanity,” where followers of the three monotheistic religions are free to worship.
