ROME – Pope Francis and Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury together charged 19 pairs of Catholic and Anglican bishops to return to their home countries and work together to promote joint prayer, joint proclamation of the Gospel and, especially, joint works of charity and justice.
“Today we rejoice to commission them and send them forth in pairs as the Lord sent out the 72 disciples,” the pope and archbishop said in a common declaration signed Oct. 5 at the end of an evening prayer service.
The 38 bishops, who are part of the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission, included: for the United States, Episcopalian Bishop John Bauerschmidt of Tennessee and Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Denis J. Madden of Baltimore; for Canada, Anglican Bishop Dennis Drainville of Quebec and Catholic Bishop Gary Gordon of Victoria, British Columbia; and for Australia, Anglican Bishop John Parkes of Wangaratta and Catholic Archbishop Christopher Prowse of Canberra-Goulburn. Continue reading
“Hurricane Matthew is a monster storm. Now it has a monster image to match. A sinister image of Hurricane Matthew, resembling a human skull, has lit up the Internet. The creepy satellite photo was posted Tuesday by Weather Channel senior meteorologist Stu Ostro as the hurricane made landfall in Haiti. The image shows the hurricane through an infrared camera lens. It’s been tweaked to show the storm in apocalyptic colors that accentuate the hurricane’s eye and make its teeth look like the comic book character Ghost Rider or the Grinch, some Twitter users suggested. It’s creepy, but in a nutshell, CNN meteorologist Judson Jones explains that “basically, scientists use color tables to identify the strongest part of the storm.” –
“A federal judge in Alabama has admitted that the First Amendment has been compromised by a demand from the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center to censor a state Supreme Court justice, but he’s not going to make a decision now, according to 
“Jamal Mansour, 63, of Rocky River, Ohio, walked into his adult daughter’s bedroom at 1:15 a.m. Tuesday and shot her twice in the head while she slept. His daughter, Tahini Mansour, 27, died about 10 hours later at a local hospital. “We don’t have a solid motive other than an argument occurred between a father and his daughter,” said Lt. George Lichman with Rocky River Police. Islam experts and former Muslims say the suspect’s behavior is rife with clues but don’t look for the police or media to flesh them out and share those clues with the public. Mansour is a Muslim immigrant from Jordan and his alleged execution-style killing of his daughter bears the hallmarks of Islamic honor violence, says Daniel Akbari, a former top Shariah lawyer in Iran who defected to the U.S. several years ago and now lives in Texas. –
An all-Navy message sent out Tuesday says that all sailors will be required to undergo transgender behavioral education by July 2017.
“Former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen has called on the US to act as the world’s policeman to “counter autocrats like President [Vladimir] Putin.” He made the comments in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal. …
A cadre of Baptist scholars has been writing about emerging catholicity, the holy desire for unity among all ecclesial communions. Taking tradition more seriously as a source for theological construction, these Baptists urge usage of the ancient creeds of the apostolic heritage of the whole church to supplement their reading of Scripture. A leading theologian in the movement, Steven Harmon, contends, “Baptists have their own distinctive ecclesial gifts to offer the church catholic, without which even the churches currently in communion with the bishop of Rome are something less than fully catholic themselves.”
“In the US, over the past 10 years, the number of official priest exorcists has more than quadrupled from 12 to 50. But for two of America’s most active exorcists – Father Gary Thomas, whose training in Rome was chronicled in Matt Baglio’s book 
Catholic priest Fr Edward O’Donnell has been installed as an ecumenical canon at St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast.