International

Conditions harden for Belarus Catholics

A Catholic parish priest accused of “offending state authorities” in Belarus said he understood the hardships facing prisoners of conscience after just four days in jail. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone – not a single hour in such a place,” said Father Andrej Kulik, rector of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish […]

New discoveries of genocide victims Rwanda’s ‘sad reality,’ priest says

More than 1,000 corpses will be buried at the Mibilizi genocide memorial site in Rwanda on June 3. The bodies of 1,238 victims of the 1994 mass killings recently were exhumed from church-owned land, and according to a Catholic priest and diocesan official in Rwanda, the discovery of the cache of remains means the route […]

Nicaragua dictatorship confiscates assets of political prisoners it deported to U.S.

A Nicaraguan court on June 9 announced the “freezing and forfeiture” of all real estate and of all shares of commercial companies belonging to the 222 political prisoners who were deported to the U.S. in February. The ruling by Criminal Chamber 1 of the Court of Appeals based in Managua, dated May 19, points out […]

Religious tensions in Japan as Muslim population grows

Japan’s religious landscape is undergoing a transformative shift, which is all the more evident by looking at the growing number of mosques that have emerged in the country over the past two decades. The change can be attributed to a lesser degree to increasing intermarriage between Muslims and Japanese citizens (many Japanese converted to Islam […]

The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion

In 2016, when President Xi Jinping delivered a speech calling for the “Sinicization of religion” in a nation of one billion, he was espousing a century-old impulse among his people while also inadvertently underscoring a persistent paradox that Chinese Communists brought with them when they took over the country in 1949 – and have never […]

Survey finds number of deacons at lowest level since 2011

A new survey from the U.S. Bishops’ Conference and George town University shows that the number of permanent deacons in active ministry in the U.S. last year is the lowest since 2011, which “is [a trend] in keeping with the slow decline of the diaconate over the past several years.” The survey, “A Portrait of […]

Iraq launches TV station to save Syriac language

A new television channel has been launched in Iraq as an initiative to save Syriac, a language spoken for more than 2,000 years which was once the most common in Christian liturgies. An ancient dialect of Aramaic, Syriac has traditionally been the language spoken by Christians in Iraq and neighbouring Syria. The goal of the […]

Pope Francis ‘progressively improving’ after abdominal surgery

Pope Francis’s medical team reported June 9 morning that two days after undergoing surgery for an abdominal hernia, the pontiff is continually improving and spent the morning reading following a lengthy rest the day before. A June 9 statement from the Vatican said that Pope Francis “rested well during the night,” and that his medical […]

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Pope: Red Cross’ humanitarian work shows that fraternity is possible

New Vatican document lists ‘grave violations’ of human dignity