In an opening address for the World Meeting of Families, Archbishop Eamon Martin confronted many of the most neuralgic issues facing the Church today, ranging from abortion to gay marriage and clerical sex abuse, and pledged that “no one is excluded from the circle of God’s love.”
Venezuela’s spiraling economic and political crisis has left shelves bare in stores, including supermarkets and pharmacies. Sister Teresinha has heard stories about fistfights over food scraps in garbage piles in Venezuelan cities.
The Catholic Church has joined relief efforts as unprecedented floods and landslides continue to wreak havoc in India’s Kerala state, killing about 370 people within a week.
In a forceful letter released just ahead of his Aug. 25-26 trip to Ireland, and just after the blistering Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on sex abuse crimes and cover-ups in six dioceses, Pope Francis wrote Monday “no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated.”
A 16-year-old peasant girl will be beatified as a martyr in Slovakia, seven decades after she was shot in front of her family for resisting rape by a drunken Soviet soldier.
Although Pope Francis got credit from survivors for good intentions after a letter on Monday on the abuse crisis in which he confessed that the Church “showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,” the overall reaction perhaps could be summarized as, “We’ve heard it all before.”
As he prepared to travel to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families, Pope Francis said he hoped his visit would “remind us all of the essential place of the family in the life of society and in the building of a better future for today’s young people.”
In this small hillside village in the Lower Galilee, a church steeple and a minaret pierce the sky above its winding streets – neighboring dual structures that are symbolic of life on the ground where the town’s Muslim and Christian inhabitants live peacefully alongside one another.
A large contingent of Catholics from the Brooklyn Diocese are in Ireland for the World Meeting of Families. One stop on their trip: Our Lady of Knock Shrine.
Pope Francis has responded to new reports of clerical sexual abuse and the ecclesial cover-up of abuse. In an impassioned letter addressed to the whole People of God, he calls on the Church to be close to victims in solidarity and to join in acts of prayer and fasting in penance for such “atrocities”.
