Embed from Getty Images The news that the Basque separatist group ETA is to dissolve after a sixty-year reign of terror in the north of Spain and the south of France has been welcomed by the Catholic bishops of the region and by the spokesman of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference (CEE). In a statement released on Friday 20, the Bishops of Pamplona, Bilbao, San Sebastián, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Bayonne expressed their wish “that peace now take root in the region forever”,... Read more
“I wish that a certain category of Christians, in particular those in the inner circles of the Church, would change their way of seeing their faith”. This is the startling confession that the Maltese bishop Mario Grech has made in a newspaper column in which he also laments that too many Christians are “suffering from exhaustion, falsification and banalisation of our faith in Christ”. “Several of the baptized young and the not so young are abandoning religion”, Grech, the Bishop... Read more
Embed from Getty Images Against the background of Trump’s beating war drums in Syria, the Vatican has warned against the proliferation of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), also known as robotic weapons or ‘killer robots’. Speaking April 9 at a United Nations meeting in Switzerland, the representative of the Holy See to the UN offices in Geneva said that “the development of LAWS will provide the capacity of altering irreversibly the nature of warfare, becoming even more inhumane, putting in... Read more
Embed from Getty Images In an historic gesture that promises to alter the course of the venerable French tradition of laïcité, French President Emmanuel Macron called April 9 for a “dialog of truth” between the State and the Church. Speaking at a meeting with the bishops of the country, Macron affirmed his conviction that just as “a Church feigning indifference to temporal questions would not fulfil its vocation”, so “a President of the Republic who claimed to be uninterested in... Read more
Yet another debate on the “Christian identity” of Europe has broken out after the leader of the European People’s Party in the EU Parliament, the German Manfred Weber, took to Twitter to declare that “if we want to defend our way of life we must know what determines us. Europe needs a debate on identity and dominant culture”. Though Weber didn’t mention Christianity specifically in his April 2 tweet, he has in the past opined that “European values are inspired... Read more
Embed from Getty Images As many as 77 million people around the world suffer from autism spectrum disorders, according to the Autism Society, plus the millions of friends and family members indirectly affected by these pathologies. For this reason over 16,000 famous landmarks around the world, from the Empire State Building in New York to the Great Pyramids in Egypt, were lit up in blue this Monday 2nd to raise awareness of these most debilitating neurodevelopmental disorders. But where was... Read more
Embed from Getty Images On end-of-life issues, the 118 French bishops that met in their Spring Assembly last week in Lourdes say “yes to the urgency of fraternity” and no to greater access to euthanasia. In a declaration issued last Thursday 22nd, the prelates reiterated their opposition to the Claeys-Leonetti law that states that “everyone has the right to a decent and peaceful end of life” and that medical personnel should use “all the means at their disposal to ensure... Read more
The Associated Press has this Tuesday taken up the story of the Holy See’s supposed attempt to silence the ultraconservative Spanish Catholic website Infovaticana. The news agency notes that the Vatican move against Infovaticana is just one of “hundreds of actions” taken by the Holy See since 2009 “to protest the use of the Pope’s image and [that of] the Holy See in everything from souvenirs sold at monasteries and university logos to the marketing materials of foundations and business... Read more
The Vatican is currently preparing two documents on so-called “gender theory”, revealed the secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education, Archbishop Angelo Vincenzo Zani, March 12 at a conference in Rome. The first will be published in the form of a letter addressed to the bishops of the world and will be ready in coming weeks, said the prelate, adding that this missive “will not enter into the heart of the debate” but will limit itself to restating “important educational... Read more
Embed from Getty Images “Xenophobia, racism and naked hatred are not legitimate expressions of opinion, but attacks on the dignity of people”. The Catholic Bishop of Erfurt, Ulrich Neymeyr, has revealed himself to be “surprised and terrified” by the “aggressive rhetoric” currently being propounded by far-right and anti-semitic groups across Germany and Europe more generally. A phenomenon, he says, that constitutes a “worrying development” in European politics, and one that has the potential to “substantially damage… public debates and social... Read more
European Communion
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