Pope urges countries to manage migrant waves, expand legal channels; recognises 21 Copts beheaded by Islamic State as martyrs
Vatican CityReuters Pope Francis appealed to countries on Thursday to manage waves of migrants as best they can and to expand channels for their safe and regular movement, as the United States grapples with a surge of new arrivals at its southern border. Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II, the 118th Pope of the Coptic […]
Dutch priest killed in Nazi concentration camp to be declared a saint; five priests killed in Paris Commune declared “martyrs”
Vatican CityReuters Pope Francis will canonise Titus Brandsma, a Dutch priest, academic and journalist who was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp in 1942 for preaching against the Nazis, the Vatican said on Thursday. Brandsma, who was a member of the Carmelite religious order and served as president of the Catholic university at Nijmegen, began […]
Essay: The difference between heroes and martyrs
RUSSELL P JOHNSON, a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School, explains why it’s wrong to confuse “the memorialisation of victims with the commendation of heroes”…
Museum tells story of Japan’s hidden Christians
World Watch Monitor A monument in Nagasaki for the 26 Catholics who were executed here for their faith in 1597. PICTURE: Thaths via Flickr; CC 2.0 A museum telling the story of Christian persecution in Japan has opened within the premises of Japan’s oldest standing church in Nagasaki. The facility, located in a former seminary and […]
23 Catholic missionaries killed in 2017
World Watch Monitor At least 23 people working for the Catholic Church were killed in 2017, a Vatican agency has said. For the ninth consecutive year the continent in which most violent deaths occurred was America. Ten pastoral workers were killed in Africa, five in Nigeria, and two were killed in Asia, both in the Philippines, […]
COMMEMORATION: WITH HOLY OIL AND A PAINT ROLLER – COPTIC ICON PAINTERS WORK ON MEMORIAL TO VICTIMS OF ISLAMIC STATE
In an article first published by the World Council of Churches news service, KATJA DOROTHEA BUCK reports from Egypt on how icon painters are commemorating 21 martyrs killed on a Libyan beach by the so-called Islamic State in early 2015…
Open Doors disputes ‘90,000 Christian martyrs annually’ claim
World Watch Monitor Global charity Open Doors has disputed the way in which statistics on Christian “martyrs” are collected, arguing that an annual figure of 90,000, recently reported widely, is significantly higher than the accurately verifiable number. The figure, reported by some media and cited by an Italian academic on Vatican Radio, was published in research […]
Thousands attend beatification of Albanian Catholic martyrs
BosNewsLife (with Linda Bordoni of Vatican Radio) Dozens of Catholic martyrs who were killed between 1945 and 1974 by Albania’s Communist regime for their faith in Jesus Christ have been beatified according to Catholic tradition in the northwestern Albanian city of Shkodër. Up to 20,000 people attended an emotionally charged Mass in and around the main […]