Pope Francis on March 13  called for an end to the “harrowing war” in Ukraine, condemning in particular the “barbarism” of Russia’s reported attacks last week on civilians— including pregnant women and children— in the eastern city of Mariupol.
“With an aching heart I add my voice to that of the common people, who implore the end of the war,” the Pope said March 13, addressing the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome following the Angelus, a Marian prayer.
“In the name of God, listen to the cry of those who suffer, and put an end to the bombings and the attacks! Let there be real and decisive focus on the negotiations, and let the humanitarian corridors be effective and safe. In the name of God, I ask you: stop this massacre!” The Pope’s words come following numerous reports last week of civilian casualties in Mariupol, amid Russia’s attempt to seize the strategically-located city as part of its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24.
On  March 9, a Russian strike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol killed at least three people and injured at least 17, according to local officials. Amid heavy loss of life in the city, there have been reports of civilians being buried in mass graves.
Pope Francis said that Mariupol, a city of 400,000 which was founded and named for the Virgin Mary, “has become a city martyred” amid the assault.
“Faced with the barbarism of the killing of children, and of innocent and defenseless citizens, there are no strategic reasons that hold up: the only thing to be done is to cease the unacceptable armed aggression before the city is reduced to a cemetery,” the Pope said. The Pope’s words echoed those of a prominent Catholic leader in Ukraine, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who lamented March 10 what he described as the “mass murder” of Ukrainians following Russia’s full-scale invasion. The following day, March 11, Shevchuk said the assault is “becoming a war primarily against the civilian, peaceful population.”

It was March 5 , three days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine when a friend called Jerzy Donimirski, a hotel owner from Kraków.
“He told me that while half of the country stands in the line at the border to pick up a Ukrainian family, there are people that have nowhere to go, no friends, no relatives,” he told Crux.
So Donimirski decided to open his four-star hotel in the heart of Kraków, by the Floriañska historical gate, to refugees.
“It is war everyone fears. I just had to do it.”
Last Monday, the first 20 people – six adults and 11 children – occupied rooms in his hotel.
“I thought it’s not too much of a burden for our hotel to take 20 more,” so he sent another bus to the border with Ukraine. Today, he has 45 refugees in Hotel Polski.
It is because of people like Donimirski, a Catholic and member of the Order of Malta, that Poland has a million refugees in its territory and not a single refugee camp.
As the Polish Ambassador to the United States, Marek Magierowski, told: “This is probably the first migration crisis in Europe’s history, in which the host country doesn’t need to build refugee camps.”
“Here in Poland, I really felt what fraternity is,” Olga Panivnyk told Polish Television on Sunday. She escaped Ukraine a week ago.
“It was scary – there were planes flying over our heads” she recalled. “Some of our friends had to stop on the way because there was a shooting in the fields.”

A judge in El Salvador order-ed the arrest Friday of former president Alfredo Cristiani for alleged links to the murder of six Jesuit priests and two co-workers by the army during the country’s civil war, prosecutors said.
On November 16, 1989, Salvadoran troops from the now-banned Atlacatl battalion shot dead the Jesuits, five of them Spanish, at the Central American University in San Salvador. They also killed a woman who worked as their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter.
On February 25, prosecutors filed charges against Cristiani, who was president in 1989-1994, and a group of soldiers for alleged involvement in the murder.
Prosecutors said on Twitter Friday that a judge has ordered Cristiani, who is outside the country, former lawmaker Rodolfo Parker and four colonels to be put “under provisional detention.”
The former president, whose whereabouts are unknown, denied the charges and attacked Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado in a statement.
“The attorney general, in bad faith and with a clear disregard for the truth, has publicly accused me of omission and cover-up,” said Cristiani, who, in his capacity as president, was also commander-in-chief at the time of the killing. “The truth is that I never knew of the plans they had to commit those murders.”
He said that the military “never informed me or asked me for authorization because they knew that I would never have authorized Father Ellacuria or his brothers to be harmed.”
Cristiani also asserted that “at this time there are no procedural guarantees in El Salvador” be-cause most prosecutors and judges are controlled by the president.

Much like 9/11 was a defining moment for the United States, “the brutal invasion of Ukraine will be a defining moment for the world,” and “the Knights of Columbus will have to be here for the long haul,” Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly told in an exclusive interview.
Since Russian forces launch-ed a large-scale military invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, members of the Knights of Columbus in Ukraine, Poland, and the United States have launched an unprecedented humanitarian effort to help the growing number of refugees displaced by the largest conventional military attack in Europe since World War II.
“Many Europeans were not ready to believe that a land war could happen again in Europe, so the Russian attack has not only been shocking, but a game-changer that will have long-lasting consequences for Europe and for the world,” Kelly told on March 4.
Kelly has conferred with the Knights of Columbus’ state deputy for Ukraine, Yuriy Malecki, to assess the situation. The Knights of Columbus started in Ukraine in 2012 and now has 40 councils there totaling some 2,000 members. “I can say that I have met those members, and that they are very solid Catholics, very enthusiastic in how they stand for charity, unity and fraternity — the true Knights’ spirit,” Kelly explained.
Kelly sent a video message to all Ukrainian Knights “telling them that I was praying for them, that I was asking God for assistance, and recalling for them that several  proud moments in the history of the Knights of Columbus have come in the midst of tremendous challenge, such as the response of the Knights during the First and Second World Wars,” he told.

Due to acute knee pain, Pope Francis will be skipping this Sunday’s foray into the Italian city of Florence, where he was scheduled to close a summit that brought together bishops and mayors of the Mediterranean to discuss migration.
The announcement, made by the Vatican’s press office, came minutes before a previously scheduled press conference in Florence with a handful of those taking part in the February 23-27 symposium titled “Mediterranean, border of peace.”
“I could hear a two-folded pain from him: For his knee, but also for having to miss this encounter,” said Cardinal Gualiero Basetti, president of the Italian bishops’ conference that is organizing the summit.
Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, archbishop of Florence, urged those who have tickets to still take part in the celebration: “This will be a sign of our affection for the Holy Father. It was with him that we wanted to pray and we will pray with him, albeit with a contact of the heart and not with the gaze that sees him physically close to us. But he is no less close to us, with his person and his concern for the Mediterranean, especially in this moment of great crisis.”
Spanish Cardinal Cristobal Lopez, Archbishop of Rabat, Morocco, said that people often find it easy “to speak about our rights, yet it is difficult for us to speak about our duties. We speak about having a right to an education, but we do not fulfil the duty to provide that education.”
The church he leads is incredibly small: There are estimated 50,000 Catholics in Morocco; most of whom are foreigners coming from Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. “We are a church made of foreigners, but we do not want to be a foreign church.” Having said this, he identified five duties that arose so far during the summit and are applicable both in the community he leads and in the rest of the region.

Threatened by an uprising of his treacherous generals, the Christian Emperor Basil II, based in the glorious city of Byzantium, reached out to his enemies, the pagans over in the land of the Rus. Basil II was a clever deal maker. If Vladimir of the Rus would help him put down the revolt, he would give him the hand of his sister in marriage. This was a status changer for Vladimir: the marriage of a pagan to an imperial princess was unprecedented. But first Vladimir would have to convert to Christianity.
Returning to Kyev in triumph, Vladimir proceeded to summon the whole city to the banks of the river Dnieper for a mass baptism. The year is 988. This is the founding, iconic act of Russian Orthodox Christianity. It was from here that Christianity would spread out and merge with the Russian love of the mother-land, to create a powerful brew of nationalism and spirituality. In the mythology of 988, it was as if the whole of the Russian people had been baptised. Vladimir was declared a saint. When the Byzantine empire fell, the Russians saw themselves as its natural successor. They were a “third Rome”.
At the heart of this post-Soviet revival of Christianity is another Vladimir. Vladimir Putin. Many people don’t appreciate the extent to which the invasion of Ukraine is a spiritual quest for him. The Baptism of Rus is the founding event of the formation of the Russian religious psyche, the Russian Orthodox church traces its origins back here. That’s why Putin is not so much interested in a few Russian-leaning districts to the east of Ukraine. His goal, terrifyingly, is Kyev itself.

As the threat of war loomed over the world, Pope Francis called on people to pray and fast for peace in Ukraine on Ash Wednesday.
Before concluding his general audience on Feb. 23, the pope called on believers and non-believers to combat the “diabolical insistence, the diabolical senselessness of violence” with prayer and fasting.
“I invite everyone to make March 2, Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting for peace,” he said. “I encourage believers in a special way to devote themselves intensely to prayer and fasting on that day. May the Queen of Peace protect the world from the folly of war.”
In his appeal, the pope said he, like many around the world, felt “anguish and concern” after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The pope said that due to the “alarming” developments in the region, “once again, the peace of all is threatened by partisan interests.”

The number of Catholics and of Catholic men and women who devote their lives to serving them continues to grow in Africa and Asia, Vatican statistics show, but pastoral ministry is still much more readily available to Catholics in Europe.
At the end of 2020, the number of Catholics in the world reached 1.36 billion, an increase of 16 million over the previous year, according to the Vatican’s Central Office of Church Statistics, which published a brief overview of the global numbers in early February. While Catholics remained about 17.7% of the global population, their numbers grew in Africa by about 2.1% and in Asia by 1.8% while in Europe the increase was just 0.3%, said the summary, which was based on numbers reported Dec. 31, 2020. And while just over 20% of the world’s Catholics live in Europe, 40% of the world’s priests minister there. The Americas have 48% of the world’s Catholics, but only 29.3% of the world’s priests.

Putin has now ordered Russian troops into Donetsk and Luhansk. The first major conflict between two Orthodox Christian nations since the War of the Stray Dogs in 1925 has likely just begun. That conflict (the resolution of which was incidentally perhaps the only significant accomplishment of the League of Nations) was clearly and plainly a territorial dispute. On its surface so is the current conflict in Ukraine. But appearances can be deceiving. Make no mistake about it, if there is a war between Russia and Ukraine, it’ll be a religious war. The sooner those in the West recognize this reality and catch up on the details the better.
There is a very recent precedent for this. In the early part of this century, in the aftermath of 9/11, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was—quite justifiably to be clear—given a significant amount of attention. At the same time, many rushed to assure the world that those young men who flew planes into buildings and stoned unveiled women in the street, did not represent “the real Islam.”
Far fewer made the much more accurate observation that both Osama bin Laden and Abdolkarim Soroush represent real and legitimate positions within Islam, be-cause traditions are complicated and people with vastly differing worldviews can believably lay claim to the same historical community. If you need further proof of this, remember that both Greg Locke (who believes witches have infiltrated his church) and leshia Evans (who peacefully stared down police at a protest of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile) are both devout Christians.
This reality sometimes leads to conflict, particularly in historical epochs characterized by significant change and instability. Western Christianity saw its tensions boil over during the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Counter-Reformation, which not only resulted in permanent fissures within Western Christendom, but the Thirty Years’ War, which killed between 25% and 40% of the entire German population. Modern Russia also has designs on Africa, where it seeks to compete with China and the Western powers for influence on a continent of natural resources and growing markets. And there’s little doubt that Russia has, in recent years, sought increasingly to use the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument of foreign influence: in Ukraine, Serbia, Western Europe, and the United States. A tactic only made possible by the Patriarchate of Moscow’s desire to establish itself as the leader of the conservative Orthodox cause.