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High hopes pinned on new Syro-Malabar leader

The election of Bishop Raphael Thattil as the Syro-Malabar Church leader has brought high hopes for its members, especially the Catholics in the troubled Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese. “I am sure he will listen to the sane voices on the controversies concerning the Syro-Malabar Church,” says Capuchin Father Suresh Mathew, former editor of Indian Currents weekly who […]

Activists, women hail Supreme Court verdict in Bilkis Bano case

A sense of joy and hope spread across activists and women groups in India January 8 after the Supreme Court set aside the Gujarat government’s premature release of 11 convicted in a gangrape case. The apex court termed the Gujarat government order a “fraud act” and asked the convicts to surrender in two weeks and […]

Indian priest arrested under anti-conversion laws released from jail

Almost three months after his arrest, a Catholic priest in northern India charged under the country’s controversial anti-conversion laws after a complaint from a member of a Hindu nationalist organization has been granted bail and is set for release. Father Sebastian “Babu” Francis, director of social work of Allahabad diocese in the northern state of […]

Church services in the forest and help for refugees: Priests are close to the people

Two years of civil war, which has gradually intensified, have shaped the face and pastoral approach of priests, consecrated persons, catechists and pastoral workers in many dioceses of Myanmar, especially in the areas most affected by the conflict between the army and the People’s Defense Forces rebel groups, which have joined forces with the ethnic […]

Amid row over same-sex blessings, Pope laments ‘splitting into groups’ in the Church

Pope Francis on the feast of the Epiphany lamented the sharp division among Catholics of differing views, saying believers must imitate the three wise men in putting God at the centre of their lives, rather than their own ideas of the faith. Speaking to attendees of his Jan. 6 Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, the […]

Martin Scorsese says new Jesus film aims to ‘take away the negatives’ of organised religion

Adaptation of book by Shûsaku Endô, who wrote the source novel for 2016’s Silence, is understood to be set mostly in the present day Martin Scorsese is to follow up his triumphant true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon with an 80-minute film about Jesus designed to “take away the negative[s] … associated with organised religion”. In […]

Top Ukraine prelate says Vat doc on same-sex blessings applies only to Latin church

Amid a broad spectrum of reactions unleashed by Fiducia Supplicans, a new Vatican document permitting non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples, Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church has become the first eastern communion to declare explicitly that the document does not apply outside the Latin Church. “On the basis of canon. 1492 of the CCCC this Declaration concerns […]

Surrogacy is an Injustice to All Involved, Bishop Barron Says in Support of Pope Francis

Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, issued this reflection in support of the Holy Father’s recent remarks to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, which included a specific mention of the harms of surrogacy. “Pope Francis strongly condemned […]