St. Charbel Makhlouf is known in Lebanon for the miraculous healings of those who visit his tomb to seek his intercession — both Christians and Muslims.
“St. Charbel has no geographic or confessional limits. Nothing is impossible for [his intercession] and when people ask [for something], he answers,” Father Louis Matar, coordinator of the Shrine of St. Charbel in Annaya, Lebanon, told CNA.
Speaking in Arabic with the help of an interpreter, Matar said the shrine, which encompasses the monastery where the Maronite Catholic priest, monk, and hermit lived for nearly 20 years, receives approximately 4 million visitors a year, including both Christians and Muslims.
Lebanese Catholics pray at the shrine of St. Charbel, the country’s patron saint. EWTN News
Matar, who is responsible for archiving the thousands of medically-verified healings attributed to the intercession of the Maronite priest-monk, said that many miraculous cures have been obtained by Muslims.
Since 1950, the year the monastery began to formally record the miraculous healings, they have archived more than 29,000 miracles, Matar said. Prior to 1950, miracles were verified only through the witness of a priest. Now, with more advanced medical technology available, alleged miracles require medical documents demonstrating the person’s initial illness and later, their unexplainable good health.
One of the miracles documented by Matar at the end of December 2018 was that of a 45-year-old Italian woman. Suffering from a neurological disease, she was hospitalized after it was discovered she had tried to commit suicide by consuming acid.

In a new attack against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, the dictatorship of President Da-niel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has frozen the Church’s retirement fund for priests, according to lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina.
The lawyer is the author of the report “Nicaragua: A Perse-cuted Church?”, which catalogs the more than 500 attacks against the Church in the country since 2018.
“Elderly priests are not re-ceiving their pensions from the national insurance fund for priests, the product of years of contributing, due to the bank accounts of the Catholic Church being blocked,” Molina wrote on the social media site X
“The national insurance fund for priests is an institution that was created more than 20 years ago by the CEN [Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference] intending a retirement fund for priests. It’s not exactly insurance, because it doesn’t cover health issues or other Social Security issues. It’s intended as a retirement fund,” Molina explained to the Nicara-guan newspaper Confidencial Digital.
The fund receives $150 a year from active priests, parishes, and Church institutions in addition to what is collected on Ash Wednes-day.

Officials of the Catholic Church in India have asked the government of Portugal to ease the process of granting travel visas for young people planning to attend the August 1-6 World Youth Day in Lisbon, in order to accommodate almost 1,000 Indians hoping to take part in the event.
Often dubbed the “Olympics of the Catholic Church,” World Youth Day is a massive gathering of young people from around the world launched by St. John Paul II.
Whenever the event is staged in an affluent venue, however, there are often difficulties in granting visas to participants from developing nations, out of concern that some youth will remain behind and become undocumented workers and residents.
In many cases, young people hoping to make the trip are also required to be interviewed by embassy officials, though in some parts of the world applicants have reported not being called for the interview despite repeated requests.
“We are facing a lot of issues and many rejections this time,” Machado said. “We are not even sure whether all registered will get a visa to travel.”
“They look for a guarantee that the visitors will return home” from a third party willing to assume the risk. “That’s very difficult to get,” Machado said. Over 1,300 groups comprised of more than 28,600 individuals from across the United States, will travel to Lisbon, Portugal, for the thirty-seventh World Youth Day (WYD) gathering with Pope Francis.

After 13 weeks of ethnically-based violence in India’s troubled north-eastern state of Manipur, the European Parliament in Strasbourg is holding an emergency debate.
But opposition to holding votes on the resolutions has come from India, through lobbyists employed in Europe by the Hindu nationalist BJP government of Narendra Modi.
“It’s actually extraordinary. It’s quite an unexpected development”, commented Caroline Duffield of persecution charity, Open Doors.
“What it is, they’ve tabled emergency resolutions on the Indian government’s handling of the security crisis in Manipur. And really, the language is scathing, the criticisms are profound”, she said.
Details of attacks on Christians sent to Premier Christian Radio in past days has put the number of burnings of church buildings, schools, seminaries and the homes of ministers at 564, since 3 May.
These amount to 263 churches belonging to the Kuki-Zo tribe, 93 Kuki Christian buildings and 238 churches belong to Christians from the Meitei ethnic group, which witnesses say were destroyed by Hindu Meitei nationalists.
Six political groupings in the European Parliament have tabled the resolutions, which will be voted on tomorrow.
A motion laid by Spanish MEP Miguel Urbán Crespo on behalf of The Left Group criticises the “authorities´ response” to minority groups in India, saying it “has stoked ethnic divisions,” adding that “political leaders and public authorities explicitly advocated hatred towards these minorities with impunity.”
“They’re denouncing the BJP political elite, for the use of nationalist rhetoric”, reflected Caroline Duffield. “So it’s an extraordinary resolution debate underway” she told Premier Christian Radio.
For the European Peoples Party (Christian Democrats), a resolution tabled in the name of Croatian MEP Željana Zovko and 12 others, “strongly urges the Indian authorities to continue to employ all necessary measures” to halt religious violence.

In a new attack against the Catholic Church, the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua canceled the legal personhood and confiscated the assets of a congregation of women religious.
Members of the Sandinista police “like criminals broke into the house of the Sisters of the Fraternity of the Poor Ones of Jesus Christ at midnight yesterday; they were going to leave the country soon,” tweeted Martha Patrica Molina on July 2.
Molina is a Nicaraguan lawyer and researcher who authored the report “Nicaragua: a Persecuted Church?”, which details over 500 attacks against the Church by the regime.
The Nicaraguan media outlet Article 66 reported that the Ministry of the Interior took the measure July 4 and that the sisters were going to leave Nicaragua next week since the authorities had not renewed their residency permit.
The sisters later tweeted that they have gone to El Salvador to continue their mission to serve the needy.
The rationale used for the decision to seize the convent was that the congregation “failed to comply with its obligations” by not reporting its latest financial statements and because the term of its board of directors had expired in February 2021.

In recent weeks, the Southern Baptist Convention has garnered extensive attention for its decision to remove Saddleback Church from fellowship over the California-based megachurch’s decision to allow a woman to serve in the office of pastor.
In June, messengers at the SBC’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, voted overwhelmingly to uphold the disfellowshipping of Saddleback and a smaller church, Fern Creek Baptist Church of Louisville, Kentucky, (88% and 92%, respectively) for having women serve as pastors.
Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, warned during the annual meeting that Saddleback was threatening the unity of the SBC and that the issue of women pastors was not nonessential.
“It’s not just a matter of church polity; it’s not just a matter of hermeneutics,” Mohler stated during the appeals session. “It’s a matter of biblical commitment, a commitment to the Scripture that unequivocally we believe limits the office of pastor to men.”

Nearly 85% of folks who were raised Catholic were still a member of that faith group when they were interviewed. For Protestants it was even higher – over 90%. Christians just didn’t move around a whole lot back in those days. However, among those who raised without religion, the vast majority picked a faith tradition as they moved into adult-hood. That was the case for 2/3 of those raised nones in the 1970s.
However, those trends lines have not stayed flat over the last five decades. Retention is down for all Christians, but at different rates. For Catholics, it dropped below 80% somewhere in the early 1990s and it fell below 70% in the early 2010s. For Protestants, it’s still fairly high but is clearly down from the 90% reported in the 1970s. Today, about 80% of folks raised Protestant are still Protestant as adults.
The nones are different story entirely, though. It used to be that 2/3 of those raised nones identified with a religion as adults. Now, about 2/3 of those raised with no faith group are still nones into adulthood. In other words, most people raised none are still a none now. .
Evangelicals have very good retention rates, even in the last decade nearly three quarters were still part of the same faith tradition as adults. The overall retention decline for evangelicals is just five percentage points. For mainline it’s much worse. They started right around the same level as evangelicals (76%), but now it’s just 58%. That means that if you found five people who were raised in the mainline, two of them would no longer be mainline today.

After experiencing violence and persecution in the recent past, new clouds are gathering over the future of Christians in Iraq, and now threaten the highest Christian authority in the land, the Chaldean Patriarch, Card Louis Raphael Sako.
Recently, Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid issued a decree ending the “institutional recognition” of the office the cardinal holds. This was done by repealing Decree 147, signed by Mr Rashid’s predecessor, the late Jalal Talabani, on 10 July 2013, which recognised the patriarch’s appointment by the Holy See as head of the Chaldean Church “in Iraq and the world” and thus, “responsible for the assets of the Church”.
The latter aspect is what matters. “Someone wants to take control over the assets and properties held by Christians and the Church,” a source told AsiaNews.
Following the decision, President Rashid tried to clarify his decision. His Office issued a statement saying: “Withdrawing the republican decree does not prejudice the religious or legal status of Cardinal Louis Sako, as he is appointed by the Apostolic See as Patriarch of the Chaldean Church in Iraq and the world.”
The press release goes on to say that, “the abolition of the Presidential Decree is intended to correct the situation. A constitutional or legal basis was not provided for the issuance of Presidential Decree No. 147 of 2013.” At the same time, it says that Card “Sako is highly valued by the Presidency of the Republic” as “Patriarch of the Chaldean Church throughout the world.”