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.
“This meeting is the message,” the pope told the imam, Ahmed Mohamed el-Tayeb. Continue reading…
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.
“Together 2016” is an event to be held on July 16 at the National Mall in Washington, and seeks to unite those of various backgrounds to “stand together for Jesus.” Both Christians and Catholics alike will be featured at the prayer and worship event…
This week, Hall announced that Jorge Bergoglio, also known as Pope Francis, will be delivering a video message to those in attendance…
Hall traveled to Rome on Thursday to meet with the Roman Catholic leader and other Vatican officials ahead of the event… Continue reading…
Related: Pope and Hillsong plan a 1 million man gathering in DC
On June 3, 2016 Pope Francis addressed the judges and magistrates of the Vatican, insisting that the Church has a duty to intervene in political issues that cause “open wounds and dramatic suffering.” Citing the current model of the criminal justice system, he decried the prevalence of corruption and strictly penal punishments.
Pope Francis insisted that for true justice, punishment is not enough. Rather, both victims and offenders must be re-educated to give them hope for a successful re-integration into society. “No penalty that doesn’t give hope is valid. If it doesn’t give hope, it’s torture.”
“Forcefully reiterating” the Church’s stance against the death penalty, Pope Francis implores all to “let it be God who chooses when the time has come.” Source
(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.
At the same time, however, the new Fatima saga has overshadowed what could be a much more problematic bit of Vatican intrigue: how Benedict’s presence as the first ex-pope in more than six centuries is continuing to raise questions about the nature of the papacy, and the authority of Francis, the current pope.
So far, most of the media attention has been focused on the three Fatima “secrets” that the Catholic Church believes were vouchsafed by the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children in Portuguese town of Fatima in 1917. Continue reading…
ROME— Pope Francis has become an undisputed media icon over his first three years in office, and on Sunday he rubbed shoulders with some of his fellow global celebrities, including George Clooney, Richard Gere and Salma Hayek, who received an award in the Vatican for their work fighting global warming, war and terrorism.
“When peoples, families, friends separate, only animosity and even hatred can come out of that division. But when they come together in a ‘social friendship,’ we find a defense against every kind of throwaway culture,” Francis said. Continue reading…
On Saturday, Pope Francis met with the president of the Republic of Singapore, marking 35 years of diplomatic relations between the Southeast Asian country and the Holy See, and the first ever state visit by a Singaporean president to a Pope.
During the visit, President Tony Tan Keng Yam and the pontiff addressed topics relating to “the importance of interreligious and intercultural dialogue for the promotion of human rights, stability, justice and peace in south-east Asia,” according to a statement by the Holy See press office. Continue reading…
The feast of the Holy Trinity is an invitation for us to commit to enriching our everyday relationships by promoting communion, consolation, and mercy, Pope Francis said during his weekly Sunday Angelus address.
“Our being created in the image and likeness of God-communion calls us to understand ourselves as beings-in-relation, and to live interpersonal relationships in solidarity and reciprocal love,” the Pope told the pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square. Contineu reading…
“Pope Francis has met the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque at the Vatican in a historic encounter that was sealed with a hugely symbolic hug and exchange of kisses. The first Vatican meeting on Monday between the leader of the world’s Catholics and the highest authority in Sunni Islam marks the culmination of a significant improvement in relations between the two faiths since Francis took office in 2013. …Ties were badly soured when the now-retired Benedict made a September 2006 speech in which he was perceived to have linked Islam to violence, sparking deadly protests in several countries and reprisal attacks on Christians.”
One has to realize the craftiness of the beast to really appreciate what’s going on here. Benedict, as evil as he was as pope, was not the catalyst that brought the Muslims to anger that caused them to start killing Christians en masse. If it was, the killings would have begun at his remarks in 2006 wherein he said the (so called) prophet Muhammad’s teachings were “evil and inhuman.” Continue reading…
WARSAW, Poland — Polish Army troops will help secure a meeting taking place in July between Pope Francis and thousands of youths from around the world in southern Poland, a spokesman said Thursday.
Some security officials have suggested that the vast meadows wedged between a road and a river near the city of Krakow can’t guarantee the security of the July 31 meeting. They said evacuation could be difficult in an emergency and noted no medical facilities in the vicinity. Polish state and church authorities have since taken steps to ensure safety there. Continue reading…
Pope Francis says that London’s election of the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital is an example of how migrants can be integrated in Europe.
Voters in the English capital elected Sadiq Khan, the son of a Pakistani bus driver, on May 6 after a campaign in which the Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, was criticized for focusing on Labour candidate Khan’s religion.
In an interview with French Catholic newspaper La Croix published on Tuesday, the leader of the Catholic Church said that Khan’s election provided an encouraging sign as other parts of Europe put up borders to migrants coming from the Middle East and Africa. Francis, 79, cited the orchestrators of the Brussels attacks—in which suicide bombings at an airport and metro station killed 36 people in March—as an example of the consequences of not integrating migrants. Many of the perpetrators of both the Brussels attacks and Paris attacks that killed 130 people in November 2015 grew up in the Molenbeek district of the Belgian capital, seen as a haven for extremists. Continue reading…