Pope Francis is expected to avoid using the word “genocide” when he visits a memorial to the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians this weekend.
His notable change of tone from a statement last year that the wholesale killing of Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1923 was the “first genocide of the 20th century” is aimed at avoiding a repeat of the ensuing diplomatic rift between Turkey and the Vatican.
The pontiff’s three-day visit to Armenia, which begins on Friday, includes prayers at Tsitsernakaberd, widely known as the genocide memorial and museum, in the capital, Yerevan. Continue reading…
The Catholic church in 
The Pope held a meeting at the Vatican with a hundred judges from around the world. They participated in the Summit of Judges on human trafficking and organized crime that brought together legal experts to analyze this scourge and seek to combat it.
With a hugely symbolic hug and an exchange of kisses on the cheek, Pope Francis and the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar Mosque, which houses a 1,000-year-old university, took a major step toward restoring relations between major branches of the world’s two largest faiths, Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. The two met privately for 25 minutes in the pope’s private library at the Vatican.
WASHINGTON — An ecumenical event featuring Hillsong United, Lecrae, Michael W. Smith, Josh McDowell, Ravi Zacharias, Francis Chan and other renown evangelical and Catholic speakers and musicians that is set to take place in Washington, D.C. is raising concerns as it seeks to draw a million attendees to “link arms” in unity, including with the Vatican.
A document obtained by Crux, related to accusations of sexual and other forms of abuse against the founder of a powerful Catholic lay movement in Peru, suggests that the Vatican was informed of the charges as early as May 2011 but essentially took no action for four years.
The Vatican has voiced support for global health care goals and has said that Catholic institutions are committed to combating problems like communicable diseases.
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(RNS) The Vatican has always been a hothouse for conspiracy theories, and a new controversy over the so-called Third Secret of Fatima is showing just how persistent such fixations can be — to the extent that the latest episode even forced Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI out of seclusion to refute claims that he once shaded the truth about the mysterious prophecy.