The Catholic Church in Rome on January 11 strongly condemned as “offensive and unacceptable” a funeral procession outside a local church in which the casket was draped in a Nazi flag and mourners gave the fascist salute. Photos and video of the scene outside St. Lucia church following the Monday funeral service were published by the Italian online news portal Open. They showed around two dozen people gathered outside the church as the swastika-draped casket emerged, shouting “Presente!” with their right arm extended in the fascist salute.
In a statement Tuesday, the Vicariate of Rome strongly condemned the scene and stressed that neither the parish priest, nor the priest who celebrated the funeral, knew what was going to transpire outside after the funeral Mass ended.
It called the swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag “a horrendous symbol irreconcilable with Christianity.”
“This ideological and violent exploitation, especially following an act of worship near a sacred place, remains serious, offensive and unacceptable for the church community of Rome and for all people of good will in our city,” it said.
The statement quoted the parish priest, Father Alessandro Zenobbi, as distancing himself and the church from “every word, gesture and symbol used outside the church, which are attributed to extremist ideologies far from the message of the Gospel of Christ.”
Italian news reports identified the deceased as a 44-year-old former militant of the extreme right-wing group Forza Nuova, who died over the weekend of a blood clot.
Pope Francis is technically the bishop of Rome, but he delegates the day-to-day management of the diocese to his vicar, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis.

European communities, with their sprawling churches, ancient cities, culinary skills, dance, music, et al, were once proud of their Christian roots. They slowly became secular in the 20th century and the evolution continues to move in a trajectory of despising the Christian faith and its followers.
When former German chancellor Helmut Kohl suggested that Turkey would never join the European Union (EU), it was hard to dismiss the criticism that he was speaking on behalf of Europe’s Christian fraternity and his concern for preserving a common cultural heritage.
When Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi described it as a Franco-British plot to prevent the princess from marrying a Muslim
In the past, despite a policy-based separation of church and state, they worked together in crises as hands of the same body. In a secularized society, the state distanced itself from the church in the guise of nationalism and secular policies.
This has led to populist leaders in Europe interpreting religion according to their political views. Their current mantra of “inclusion” excludes the continent’s Christian roots and traditions. According to liberals, Europe’s strength lies in its diversity, and embracing differences of approach is necessary to pre-vent another war from taking place among European nations.

A bishop in the southern Italian region of Campania is making waves for his recent decision to ban priests, religious, and lay people who have not been vaccinated from distributing communion at Mass in a bid to curb Italy’s rising infection rate.
Bishop Giacomo Cirulli, who leads the Dioceses of Teano-Calvi and Alife-Caiazzo, in the Italian region of Campania, which has had 11,815 new COVID cases and five new COVID-related deaths in past 24 hours, issued a decree announcing the ban earlier this week.
In the Jan. 8 decree, Cirulli said the status of the pandemic “is constantly and seriously worsening,” and invited the faithful under his pastoral direction to “respect and strictly enforce prophylaxis and the sanitation norms for the containment of the pandemic within our churches and in the relevant premises.”
Specifically, he urged faithful to obey the rules of a May 7, 2020, Memorandum of Under-standing between the Italian government and CEI on the resumption of liturgical celebrations, which bans the use of holy water and the reception of communion on the tongue, requires Mass attendees to maintain at least three feet of distance, use hand sanitizer, and to wear face masks.
Cirulli asked Mass-goers to “to strictly respect the distance and therefore the number of admissions into the liturgical hall” in the days and weeks to come.

Pope Francis’ decision in July to re-impose restrictions on the celebration of the older form of the Latin Mass appears not to have affected his standing among U.S. Catholics, according to a report released Oct. 7 by the Pew Research Center. About 83% of Catholics in the country have a favourable view of Francis, based on responses from 1,374 Catholics to a Pew online survey in September. Some 65% of the respondents said they had heard “nothing at all” about Francis’ decision, which reversed a 2007 move by retired Pope Benedict XVI to allow priests to celebrate the form of the Mass used before the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council.

When Kent Albright, a Baptist pastor from the United States, arrived as a missionary to Spain in 1996, he was unprepared for the insults and threats, or the fines from the police for handing out Protestant leaflets on the streets of Salamanca. “Social animosity was big — they had never seen a Protestant in their life,” said Albright, recalling one woman who whispered, “Be thankful we don’t throw stones at you.”
He couldn’t have imagined that 25 years later, he would be pastoring an evangelical congregation of 120 and count about two dozen other thriving Protestant churches in the north-western city. And there’s a distinctive feature to the worshippers: Most of them are not Spanish-born — they’re immigrants from Latin America, including about 80 percent of Albright’s congregation.
The numbers reflect huge surges in Spain’s migrant population and evangelical population in recent decades, producing profound changes in how faith is practiced in a country long dominated by the Catholic Church. “The Bible says there are no ethnicities, there are no races. I don’t go down the street asking, nor do I ask for passports at the church door.” Albright said. He marvels that in a course he teaches for deacons, his six students include one each from Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador.
One of the newest members of his congregation is Luis Perozo, 31, a former police officer from Maracaibo, Venezuela who arrived in Spain in February 2020 and applied for asylum with his wife, Narbic Escalante, 35.
While the couple wait for their status to be resolved, Perozo works in the laundry of a hotel. His wife does nursing in a retirement home.
“I was a lifelong Catholic,” says Escalante. “When I arrived in Salamanca, I entered the church, looked everywhere, said hello, and they ignored me. I went to several churches — I felt absolutely nothing.”
Perozo and Escalante soon visited Albright´s church — one of Perozo’s uncles had emigrated earlier and was already a member.
“The next day, Pastor Albright was helping us find a house, appliances and kitchenware. He moved us with his van,” Escalante said.
She commended Albright’s approach to pastoring, including services with lively music and less emphasis on repetitive prayer.
“I definitely feel better here than in the Catholic Church,” she says. “It allows me to live more freely, with less inhibitions.”

The loud noise from the opening of an iron door marks Jorge Anguilante’s exit from the Pinero prison every Saturday. He heads home for 24 hours to minister at a small evangelical church he started in a garage in Argentina’s most violent city.
Before he walks through the door, guards remove handcuffs from “Tachuela” — Spanish for “Tack,” as he was known in the criminal world. In silence, they stare at the hit-man-turned-pastor who greets them with a single word: “Blessings.”
The burly, 6-foot-1 man whose tattoos are remnants of another time in his life — back when he says he used to kill — must return by 8 a.m. to a prison cellblock known by inmates as “the church.”
His story, of a convicted murderer embracing an evangelical faith behind bars, is common in the lockups of Argentina’s Santa Fe province and its capital city of Rosario. Many here began peddling drugs as teenagers and got stuck in a spiral of violence that led some to their graves and others to overcrowded prisons divided between two forces: drug lords and preachers.
Over the past 20 years, Argentine prison authorities have encouraged, to one extent or another, the creation of units effectively run by evangelical inmates — sometimes granting them a few extra special privileges, such as more time in fresh air.
The cellblocks are much like those in the rest of the prison — clean and painted in pastel colors, light blue or green. They have kitchens, televisions and audio equipment — here used for prayer services.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called Pope Francis on December 17 to congratulate him on his 85th birthday, praising the pontiff’s efforts to strengthen ties between the Vatican and Russia.
The Russian leader noted Francis’s “high global authority and his big personal contribution to the development of ties bet-ween Russia and the Vatican,” the Kremlin said in its readout.
It added that Putin and the pope agreed to “continue joint efforts to uphold core spiritual and humanitarian values,” and emphasized the importance of a “constructive inter-religious dialogue.”
The call followed Francis’s statement earlier this month that he had plans for a possible second meeting with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, following their historic 2016 encounter in Cuba — the first-ever meeting between the leaders of the two churches.
Francis said he planned to meet next week with a Russian church envoy to agree “on a possible meeting” with Patriarch Kirill. Francis noted that Kirill is due to travel in the coming weeks, adding that he was also “ready to go to Moscow” even if diplomatic protocols weren’t yet in place.
The two churches split during the Great Schism of 1054 and have remained estranged over a host of issues, including the primacy of the pope and Russian Orthodox accusations that the Catholic Church is poaching converts in former Soviet lands.

A Catholic nurse was unfairly dismissed by a U.K. hospital trust for wearing a cross necklace, an employment tribunal ruled this week.
In a decision published on Jan. 5, the tribunal said that the trust’s treatment of Mary Onuoha was “directly discriminatory.”
The campaign group Chris-tian Concern hailed the verdict as a “landmark ruling” strengthening the legal principle that employers cannot discriminate against employees for “reasona-ble manifestations” of faith in the workplace.
Onuoha was forced to leave her job as a National Health Ser-vice (NHS) theatre practitioner at Croydon University Hospital in south London in June 2020 after a two-year battle with her employers over wearing the cross.
With support from the Christian Legal Centre, Christian Concern’s legal ministry, she took her case against Croydon Health Services NHS Trust to an employment tribunal.
At a hearing in October 2021, the trust argued that the cross necklace had presented an infection risk. But the tribunal concluded that the risk was “very low.”
It added that there was “no cogent explanation” of why religious head coverings such as hijabs and turbans were permitted under the dress code and uniform policy, but “a fine necklace with a small pendant of religious devotional significance is not.”
Christian Concern said that Onuoha, who was born in Nigeria and moved to the U.K. in 1988, was delighted and relieved by the ruling.