At least one person was killed and at least 15 others – including at least one police officer – were seriously injured in exchanges of gunfire in central Vienna that Austria’s interior minister descri-bed as a terror attack.
One attacker was shot dead after incidents at six locations close to Seitenstettengasse street in the heart of the Austrian ca-pital, a spokesperson for Vien-na’s police force told broadcaster ORF.
The local APA news agency reported that a bystander had also been shot dead.
“At the moment I can confirm we believe this is an apparent terror attack,” Karl Nehammer, the interior minister, told ORF.
He said the attacks were thought to have been carried out by several people with long guns, adding there were likely to be more casualties.
“We believe there are several perpetrators. Unfortunately there are also several injured, probably also dead,” he said.
A total of 15 people were being treated for injuries in local hospitals late on November 2, a spokesperson for the Vienna hospital association told ORF. Seven victims were reported to be critical condition.

President Donald Trump won support from about 8 in 10 white Evangelical Christian voters in his race for reelection, but Ca-tholic voters split almost evenly between him and Democratic opponent Joe Biden, according to AP Vote Cast.
Trump’s strong hold on white evangelical voters illustrates the GOP’s enduring success with a bloc of religious conservatives who have been a linchpin of the president’s political base since his 2016 victory. The president’s path to a second term has grown narrower, however, amid a divide among Catholics between Trump and Biden, a lifelong member of the faith.
AP Vote Cast showed 50% of Catholics backing Trump and 49% favouring Biden, reflecting the faith’s longstanding role as a closely contested vote in presi-dential elections — particularly in Rust Belt battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump won both of those states by less than 1 percentage point in 2016, but Biden prevailed in both this year. The survey of more than 110,000 voters nation-wide was conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.

In an unprecedented move for the Polish Church, the Vatican banned a retired cardinal from public ministry, public appearances, and the use of the bishop’s insignia. Cardinal Henryk Gulbinowicz of Wroclaw also cannot be buried in the archdiocesan cathedral after his death. The disciplinary measures are a historic and symbolic moment for the Church in Poland.

An Italian priest who called out Pope Francis as “mediocre” and a “heretic in need of conver-sion” in his All Saints Day sermon has been suspended by his bishop. Father Fabio Ragusa, assistant priest in the parish Borgio Verezzi, Savona, denounced the pontiff for “uttering truly senseless statements” endorsing homosexual civil unions and stressed that “it was imperative to obey the Catechism and the Church’s doctrine.”

Pope Francis pledged November 11 to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore Mc-Carrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decades-long church cover-up of his sexual misconduct.
The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dis-missing mountains of evidence of McCarrick’s misconduct starting in the 1990s — but largely spared Francis. Instead, it laid the lion’s share of the blame on St John Paul II, a former Pope, for having appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington in 2000, and making him a cardinal, despite having commissioned an inquiry that found he had slept with seminarians.
Francis concluded his weekly general audience by recalling that the report into the “painful case” of the former high-ranking American cardinal had been released the previous day.
“I renew my closeness to victims of any abuse and commit-ment of the church to eradicate this evil,” Francis said. He then paused silently for nearly a minute, apparently in prayer.

While the world is still digesting the McCarrick report, released by the Vatican on November 10, the blame game has begun in Poland, St John Paul II’s homeland. One of the report’s few living protagonists is Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s longtime personal secretary, who was mentioned 45 times in the document.
But the storm for Dziwisz actually started the day before the report was released, when TVN24 aired “Don Stanislaw” by journalist Marcin Gutowski, a 90-minutes-long documentary “showing another face of Cardinal Dziwisz,” as the station advertised it.
RELATED: Poland becomes testing ground for Vatican’s new anti-abuse legislation
The film aired a long list of accusations from covering up for his friends from the seminary, to the role of Dziwisz in the case of the late Father Marcial Maciel, the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ, another other dark spot in John Paul’s pontificate.
The McCarrick report and the documentary “Don Stanislaw” both contained accusations Dziwisz hid correspondence from  John Paul.
But the Vatican report also confirmed letters sent to Dziwisz regarding the McCarrick case, and even the one written by the American prelate in August 2000 defending himself, was indeed given to the pope. The release of the McCarrick report has been hotly debated in Poland, especially how it might influence the legacy of John Paul.

Pope Francis announced he will create 13 new cardinals on Nov. 28, including Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Washing-ton. The Pope made the announcement at the end of his Angelus address on Oct. 25, telling the crowd in St Peter’s Square the names of the nine cardinals under the age of 80, who will be eligible to vote in a conclave, and the names of four elderly churchmen whose red hats are a sign of esteem and honour.
Once the consistory is held in late November, there will be 128 cardinals under the age of 80 and eligible to vote in a conclave. Pope Francis will have created just over 57% of them. Sixteen of the cardinals created by St John Paul II will still be under 80 as will 39 of the cardinals created by Pope Benedict XVI; Pope Francis will have created 73 of the electors. Italians will continue to have an outsized portion of the electors, rising to 22 of the 128; the United States will stay at nine voters with Cardinal-designate Gregory taking Cardinal Wuerl’s place.
Here is the full list of the new cardinals, in the order named by the Pope:
• Maltese Bishop Mario Grech, 63, secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops.
• Italian Bishop Marcello Semeraro, 72, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes.
• Archbishop Antoine Kambanda of Kigali, Rwanda, who will turn 62 on Nov. 10.
• Archbishop Gregory, 72.
• Archbishop Jose F. Advincula of Capiz, Philippines, 68.
• Archbishop Celestino Aos Braco of Santiago, Chile, 75.
• Bishop Cornelius Sim, apostolic vicar of Brunei, 69.
• Italian Archbishop Paolo Lojudice of Siena, 56.
• Franciscan Father Mauro Gambetti, custos of the Sacred Convent of Assisi in Assisi, who was to celebrate his 55th birthday on Oct. 27.
• Retired Bishop Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel of San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, 80.
• Retired Italian Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, a former nuncio, 80.
• Italian Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, 86.
• Italian Father Enrico Feroci, 80, former director of Rome’s Caritas.

A laicized priest who had been the spiritual director to six people who said they experienced visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Bosnian town of Medjugorje has been excommunicated.
Tomislav Vlasic, who had been a Franciscan priest until he was laicized in 2009, was excommu-nicated on July 15 by a decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. The excommunication was announced by the Diocese of Brescia, Italy, where the laicized priest lives.
The Brescia diocese said that since his laicization, Vlasic “has continued to carry out apostolic activities with individuals and groups, through conferences and online; he has continued to present himself as a religious and priest of the Catholic Church, simulating the celebration of sacraments.”
The diocese said Vlasic has been the source of “serious scandal to Catholics,” by disobeying the directives of ecclesiastical authorities. When he was laicized, Vlasic was forbidden from teaching or engaging in apostolic work, and especially from teaching about Medjugorje.
He was in 2009 accused of teaching false doctrine, manipulating consciences, disobeying ecclesiastical authority, and of committing acts of sexual mis-conduct. A person who is excommunicated is prohibited from receiving the sacramentals until the penalty has been lifted.
Alleged Marian apparitions in Medjugorje have long been a subject of controversy in the Church, which have been investigated by the Church but not yet authenticated or rejected.
The alleged apparitions began on June 24, 1981, when six children in Medjugorje, a town in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, began to experience phenomena which they have claimed to be apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Pope Francis warned Europe’s leaders on October 27 that the project of European unity is at risk unless they “rediscover the path of fraternity” that inspired the project’s founders.
In a letter signed on Oct. 22, the feast day of St John Paul II, and released on Oct. 27, the Pope wrote: “We can either continue to pursue the path we have taken in the past decade, yielding to the temptation to auto-nomy and thus to ever greater misunder-standing, disagreement and conflict, or we can rediscover the path of fraternity that inspired and guided the founders of modern Europe, beginning precisely with Robert Schuman.”
He made the remarks in a letter marking three milestones: the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE); the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the European Union; and the 50th anniversary of the Holy See’s presence as a Permanent Observer at the Council of Europe.
The letter was addressed to the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who had planned to travel to the Belgian capital, Brussels, on Oct. 28-30.
In the letter, the Pope noted that the cardinal intended to make “significant visits to the authorities of the European Union, the Plenary Assembly of COMECE and the authorities of the Council of Europe.”
But the Vatican announced on Oct. 27 that Parolin had cancelled the trip because of new restrictions seeking to slow the spread of the corona virus.
The Argentine Pope explained in the letter that he wanted to share his reflections on the future of Europe, a continent that he said was “so dear to me,” not only because of his family’s Italian roots, but also because of Europe’s “central role … in the history of humanity.”
He said that the pandemic had underlined the importance of cooperation between European countries and the danger of giving in to “the temptation to go it alone, seeking unilateral solutions to a problem that transcends state borders.”
The Pope made a lyrical appeal addressed directly to Europe, urging the continent not to dwell on past glories.
He said: “Sooner or later, we realize that we ourselves have changed; we find ourselves weary and listless in the present and possessed of little hope as we look to the future. Without ideals, we find ourselves weak and divided, more prone to complain and to be attracted by those who make complaint and division a style of personal, social and political life.” In his letter, the Pope called for a “healthy secularism” in Europe, where believers were free to profess their faith in public.

Pope Francis’ endorsement of same-sex civil unions will lead the Catholic faithful to convert en masse to Orthodox Christia-nity and Protestantism, a senior Russian Orthodox Church official said Thursday.
Francis became the first pontiff to voice support for same-sex couples in a documentary that premiered in Rome on Wednesday. His stance marks a departure from the Vatican doctrine office’s 2003 document opposing the “legal recognition of homosexual unions.” Roman Silantyev, the head of human rights at the Orthodox Church’s World Russian People’s Council, called Pope Francis’ comments “a strong step toward degradation.”
“People will run to the Orthodox and Protestants after that,” Silantyev told the Podyom news website. “This might cause some kind of split since many Catholics are quite conservative.”
His comments come amid Russia’s increasing embrace of conservative values, with persisting intolerance toward the LGBT community and criticism of the liberal West. A majority of Russians voted this summer in favor of constitutional changes which, in addition to allowing President Vladimir Putin to extend his rule, added language defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman to the Constitution.
Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1993. Twenty years later, it banned “homosexual propaganda toward minors,” which activists say the authorities use to prevent them from displaying LGBT flags and holding gay pride events.