A 72-year-old Catholic nun has been praised for her “extra-ordinary courage” after she sought to disarm a man stabbing a priest at a Catholic church in Nice, south-eastern France.
Sister Marie-Claude reportedly intervened after a 31-year-old man entered the Saint-Pierre d’Arene church before Sunday Mass on April 24 and repeatedly stabbed Father Krzysztof Rudziñski.
She received a wound to the forearm and was taken to a hospital along with the 57-year-old priest.
The Diocese of Nice said in an April 24 statement that neither the sister nor the priest suffered life-threatening injuries in the incident, which police said was not related to terrorism.
Local politician Éric Ciotti commended the sister in a post on his Twitter account.
“Extraordinary courage of Sister Marie-Claude who intervened while the attacker continued to stab Father Christophe,” he wrote.
“She snatched the knife from him while being injured on the forearm.”
Father Rudziñski, originally from Suchowola, north-eastern Poland, is believed to have been stabbed up to 20 times, mainly in the chest.
Bishop Piotr Turzyñski, the Polish bishops’ delegate for the pastoral care of Polish immigrants, appealed for prayers for the priest and sister.

A knife-wielding man mortally wounded a Coptic priest during an attack at the popular seaside promenade in Alexandria on April 7 evening, Egypt’s interior ministry said.
The ministry said the priest died while being treated for his wounds. It said the suspected attacker had been arrested.
The priest was identified by the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria as Arsanious Wadid, 56. It said he had served at a local parish,
Sectarian violence is not un-common in Egypt, where an Orthodox Christian minority, the Copts, is believed to be among the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Christians make up more than 10% of Egypt’s mostly Muslim population. Violence between communities occasionally erupts, mainly in rural communities in the south. Islamic extremists have also targeted Christians in the past.

Pope Francis spent 40 minutes with Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, whom he received in audience on April 21 morning. The premier arrived at the Vatican shortly before 11 am, accompanied by his wife and entourage, and did not meet with other Vatican authorities due to the private nature of his visit. Orbán is on his first trip abroad since his re-election as head of his government on 3 April. “My first official trip after the elections will take me to the Vatican, to Pope Francis,” Orbán himself revealed on Wednesday via his Facebook account.  Pope Francis welcomed the Prime Minister in the Apostolic Library inviting him to take a seat. The conversation between the two leaders took place in the presence of an interpreter, but speaking in English, the Pope blessed Mr. Orbán, his family, and Hungary, a country that is engaged in offering shelter to neighbouring Ukrainians fleeing the war.

When researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report saw this year’s survey statistics, they found it hard to believe the results. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year.
“We reviewed our calculations. We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,” John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. “What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.”
In 2021, about 50 percent of Americans said they read the Bible on their own at least three or four times per year. That percentage had stayed more or less steady since 2011.
But in 2022, it dropped 11 points. Now only 39 percent say they read the Bible multiple times per year or more. It is the steepest, sharpest decline on record.
According to the 12th annual State of the Bible report, it wasn’t just the occasional Scripture readers who didn’t pick up their Bibles as much in 2022 either. More than 13 million of the most engaged Bible readers—measured by frequency, feelings of connection to God, and impact on day-to-day decisions—said they read God’s Word less.
Currently, only 10 percent of Americans report daily Bible reading. Before the pandemic, that number was at about 14 percent.
Plake thinks the dramatic change shows how closely Bible reading – even indepen-dent Bible reading – is connected to church attendance. When regular services were interrupted by the pandemic and related health mandates, it impacted not just the corporate bodies of believers but also individuals at home.
“The elephant in the room is COVID-19,” he told CT. “As we’ve been tracking and kind of digging into what really ha-ppened around Scripture engagement in 2022, we realized there were some big issues happening in the United States at the time that we were collecting the data.”
The State of the Bible survey collected data in January 2022 as the omicron variant of the coronavirus was surging.
Most churches remained open, with an additional online option. Only about 3 percent were not meeting in person at all, according to Lifeway Research. But the pandemic took a visible toll on church attendance. Pew Research Center found that nearly a third of regular churchgoers have not returned to church buildings. Some choose to participate online, but others have dropped out completely.

Ukrainian and Russian families will carry the cross together during the Stations of the Cross led by Pope Francis at Rome’s Colosseum on Good Friday.
The Vatican has published the meditations and prayers for the Pope’s Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, which will focus this year on the many “crosses” of family life.
The meditations include reflections from a couple without children, a family with a disabled child, a family with an ill grand-parent, a family of migrants, and families suffering due to the Ukraine war.
For the 13th station, “Jesus dies on the Cross,” a Ukrainian family and a Russian family will read a reflection that they wrote together about how their lives were upended by the pain of war. “Why has my land become as dark as Golgotha? We have no tears left. Anger has given way to resignation,” the text of the reflection says.
“Lord, where are you? Speak to us amid the silence of death and division, and teach us to be peacemakers, brothers and sisters, and to rebuild what bombs tried to destroy,” it says. The prayer following the meditation calls Jesus’ pierced side a “wellspring of reconciliation for all peoples” and asks God that “families devastated by tears and blood may believe in the power of forgiveness.”
The two families, whose home countries are at war, will carry a wooden cross together for the 13th station in the Colosseum before passing it to a family of migrants, who will carry the cross for the final station.
On April 15 at 9:15 p.m., Pope Francis will preside over the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum, a Roman practice dating back to the pontificate of Benedict XIV, who died in 1758.
This is the first time that the pope is returning to the Colosseum on Good Friday since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past two years, papal liturgies during Holy Week were kept very small due to pandemic restrictions.

Pope Francis on April 7 recalled the 500th anniversary of the election of Pope Adrian VI, who sought reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Martin Luther during his short pontificate.
“In his brief pontificate, which lasted only a little more than a year, he sought above all reconciliation in the Church and the world, putting into practice the words of St. Paul, according to which God entrusted precisely to the Apostles the ministry of reconciliation,” Pope Francis said on April 7.
For this reason, Adrian VI sent the nuncio to the Imperial Diets of Nuremberg “to reconcile Luther and his followers with the Church, and expressly asking forgiveness for the sins of the prelates of the Roman Curia,” he stated.
“Courageous,” Francis add-ed. “He would have plenty of work today.”

Without naming names, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri lamented how a national leader, yearning to restore “a past of imperialist power,” can sow death and destruction.
The cardinal’s apparent reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine came during a homily April 5 at a Mass in Orvieto with officers and cadets of Italy’s Finance Police, who were attending an anti-terrorism training course.
Before celebrating the Mass, Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, gave an overview of the situation facing Eastern Catholics in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, his office said.
The Old Testament reading at the Mass recounted how the Israelites complained to Moses and to God after they had been led out of Egypt and slavery and, the cardinal said, seemed almost to long for what they had when they were enslaved.

When can devotees of “The Passion of the Christ” be able to see the sequel?
Not anytime soon, from the sounds of it.
In an interview on “The World Over” that aired April 7, Gibson, who produced, co-wrote, and directed the hugely successful 2005 film about the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ, told EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo that he hasn’t yet settled on a script for the sequel, which picks up the story with Jesus’ resurrection.
“So when can we expect a script, Mel?” Arroyo asked.
“Well, I’ve got two scripts,” Gibson revealed. “So I’ve got the pair of them, and they’re both good.”
Arroyo interviewed Gibson, actor Mark Wahlberg, and writer-director Rosalind Ross about the launch of their new film, “Father Stu,” a biopic about the late Father Stuart Long, a no-nonsense Montana priest who died of a rare muscular condition in 2014.
Wahlberg plays the role of Father Stu in the film and Gibson plays the role of Bill Long, the late priest’s father. The film comes out nationwide April 13, to coincide with the start of Holy Week.
“Father Stu was a living embodiment of grace and strength and suffering. And you hear it from anybody whose life he touched, that he was incredibly grateful for what afflicted him and had such dignity and strength in it,” Ross told Arroyo.

Prayers are being sought for the safe release of Sister Suellen Tennyson, 83, an American Catholic nun who was reportedly kidnapped in Burkina Faso the night of April 4.
“On the night of Mon-day 4 to Tuesday 5 April 2022, Unidentified Armed Men (UAM) visited the community of nuns in Yalgo Parish of the Diocese of Kaya. They abducted Sister Suellen Tennyson, from the Congregation of Marianite Sisters of the Holy Cross,” Bishop Théophile Nare of Kaya said in an April 5 statement shared with ACI Africa.
The bishop added, “Sr. Suellen Tennyson was taken to an unknown destination by her kidnappers who, before leaving, vandalized rooms (and) damaged the community vehicle, which they attempted to take with them.” “Until the search for her is successful, we remain in communion of prayer for the release of Sr. Suellen Tennyson,” Bishop Nare stated.

Months after protests of the government’s apparent refusal to approve the rebuilding of a damaged church, nine Christian protesters in Egypt remain in detention as supporters call for their re-lease.
“Instead of arresting a number of residents of the estate, official and security authorities should have responded promptly to their demands and issued a decision to rebuild the church,” Ishak Ibrahim, a freedom of religion and belief expert at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said March 13.
He noted that the villagers had taken a legal path to seek the permit.
At the centre of the matter is the Coptic Orthodox St. Joseph and Abu Sefein Church in Ezbet Farag Allah village in the Minya governorate. In 2016 the church was severely damaged by an unexplained fire that some locals fear was deliberately set. It was the only church for the 800 Christians in the area.