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.

A statue of Christ is being built in Brazil that will be larger than the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue of Rio de Janeiro.
The image, which has been under construction since 2019, will be called Cristo Protector and is being erected on the Cerro de las Antenas, a hill near Encantado in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The project was planned to be completed by the end of 2021, but the state government extended the deadline until the end of January 2022. Christ the Protector will be 140 feet tall, 16 more than the Christ the Redeemer in Río de Janeiro.
Christ the Protector will be 118 feet wide hand to hand. Once completed, visitors will be able to take an interior elevator to the heart on the statue’s chest, from where they will have a panoramic view of Encantado, Lake Garibaldi, and the Taquari Valley.

For decades, the Christian congregation founded by Mother Teresa in an Indian slum was seen by supporters as a symbol of selfless giving and a magnet for donations from around the world. But to India’s Hindu right wing, it was a target of their ire — and a hotbed, some alleged, for the conversion of desperate Hindus into Christians.
Now, the Missionaries of Charity — an organization that grew from a humble order of 12 sisters led by Mother Teresa into one of the world’s most recognizable Christian non-profits with branches from Venezuela to Washington, D.C. — is facing potentially crippling sanctions from the Indian government. The organization’s international donations will be effectively frozen on Saturday after India’s Home Ministry said Monday it will not renew the group’s license to receive funds from abroad because it found “adverse inputs.”
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Although the ministry did not provide details about its reasoning or the case, the decision comes at a moment of rising Hindu nationalism in India — and mounting scrutiny of foreign non-profits and human rights organizations — under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.
The funding ban threatens an operation of thousands of nuns who have depended for decades on the enduring legacy of Mother Teresa to raise money from around the world and use it to provide shelter, food and education for orphans, the homeless and the sick. Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was made a saint in 2016.
Leaders at the Missionaries of Charity declined to comment but issued a brief statement saying they have asked members to stop accessing accounts with foreign funds until the matter is “resolved.” A senior official from the Archdiocese of Calcutta, where the non-profit is based, condemned the government move as an attack on both the Christian community and on “the poorest of India’s poor” who depend on its services.

22 Catholic missionaries were killed around the world in 2021, half of them in Africa, according to a report released by the Fides News Agency and distributed Thursday by the Vatican press office.
Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, reported that of the 22 missionaries killed in 2021, 13 were priests, two were women religious, one was a male religious, and six were lay people. Half of the total were killed in Africa: seven priests, two religious sisters, and two lay people.
In its report, Fides explains that their annual list “has not only included missionaries ad gentes in the strict sense, but has tried to register all Catholic Christians engaged in some way in a pastoral activity who died violently, not expressly ‘in hatred of the faith’.” According to the report, seven missionaries were murdered in Latin America, three in Asia, and one in Europe.
“In recent years, Africa and Latin America have alternated in the first place of this tragic ranking. From 2000 to 2020, according to our data, 536 missionaries were killed world-wide,” says the report.

To close a year in which he put limits on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, Pope Francis warned against the temptations of pride, spiritual worldliness, and attachment to superficial reassurances, including liturgical preferences.
In his Dec. 23 speech to members of the Roman Curia, the Pope centred on the biblical figure of Naaman the Syrian, who while being a powerful general in the Syrian army known for his courage and bravery, also had leprosy, which he hid beneath his armour.
In his search for a cure, Naaman, taking the advice of a slave girl, set out to find the Prophet Elisha for help.
Although he initially believed Elisha’s command to shed his armor and bathe in the Jordan River seven times to be too simple, he eventually obeyed and was healed, but only after humbling himself and letting go of his notions of power.
“The story of Naaman re-minds us that Christmas is the time when each of us needs to find the courage to take off our armor, discard the trappings of our roles, our social recognition and the glitter of this world,” and adopt an attitude of humility, the Pope said.

Across the world, girls and young women from Christian families are forced into sexual slavery and religious conversion.
This is one of the most underreported examples of the persecution of Christians, usually in Muslim-majority countries with significant Christian popu-lations, such as Egypt and Paki-stan.
Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) documented first-hand accounts of kidnappings, forced marriages and forced conversions in its Hear Her Cries report, pre-sented in London on Nov. 24.
The pontifical charity was marking Red Wednesday, an annual event meant to draw atten-tion to the plight of persecuted Christians around the world.
The report noted that examining the topic of sexual violence and persecution of faith minorities is far from strai-ghtforward.
“While there is growing consensus about the need for research into the nature and scale of religious and sexual coercion of women, the challenges of setting about the task have been consistently highlighted in studies on the subject.”

Catholics are facing soaring levels of discrimination in some of the most influential countries in Europe, a new report said.
The Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance Against Christians in Europe identified the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden as the five countries most affected by a “rising phenomenon” of harassment and violence toward Christians.
“These countries were selected because, according to our observations, Christians face the most difficulties in them,” said the Dec. 7 report, “Under Pressure: Human Rights of Christians in Europe.”
It said Christians increasingly endured both subtle and explicit discrimination as a result of secularist and Islamist ideologies taking hold in the local populations, producing an intolerance that is “becoming more visible.”
The report found that the phenomenon had resulted in a 70 percent increase in hate crimes against Christians in 2019 and 2020. “The negation of a public voice is mainly based on strong and sometimes even extreme opposition to Christian morals derived from core beliefs,” the report said.
“In some cases, it does not stop at negation, but goes even further toward a criminalization of public or even private opinions.”
The report, compiled over two years, concluded by inviting “international and civil-society organizations to contribute toward improving this situation by reporting and raising awareness about this phenomenon.”