Leprosy is on the verge of extinction, but because of the pandemic sufferers of the disease face more discrimination than ever, says Ferdie Rous

Iraq's Christians are heirs of a long linguistic tradition that dates back well before Christ, a tradition now tied to their fate.

Sometimes we need to speak ill of the dead. We may need to speak critically when the dead is a public figure whose memory his ideological allies use to promote their cause. When political people memorialize him in a way that establishes their favored political narrative. We must criticize to try to establish the truth. And as Catholics, we should be critical for another reason.

After blessing and signing the luxury sports car, the Vatican auctioned it off six months later via Sotheby’s in London for $950,000, a portion of which was earmarked to help with the restoration of destroyed towns in the Nineveh Plains. The pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need was entrusted with 200,000 euros (around $240,000), which it used to complete two building projects in Iraq, according to its director in Rome.

Hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped from a state boarding school in the north west Nigeria state of Zamfara last week have been released, a local official announced.

Jean-Marc Sauvé, the highly regarded 71-year-old career civil servant and former vice-president of France’s Council of State, told reporters on Tuesday that a June 2020 figure of 3,000 victims “is certainly an underestimate.”  

To change domestic policy, or even the course of a war, it is more important to amuse the monarch than inform him, and an insinuation will work better than an argument.

CPAC, a project of the American Conservaive Union, describes itself as “the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world,” and the conference is often billed as representative of the wider conservative movement.

The failure of the Church to adapt her policies to the new spirit of liberalism, culminating with Pope Pius IX’s condemnation of “progress, liberalism and modern civilisation” in his 1864 Syllabus of Errors, came to be seen by Catholics in in later centuries as paranoid, mistaken, even embarrassing; but the eradication of Christian values among Europeans was to lead in the next century to atrocities far exceeding those of Jacobin France.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was speaking to Italy's La Stampa newspaper. Guterres also said a security review of the incident is underway.

The statement urged the prompt release of all political prisoners and expressed support for the Catholic Bishops of Myanmar in their pleas to military authorities responsible for the coup d'etat to refrain from violence and seek reconciliation, while respecting democratic principles and human rights, "including the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the freedom of assembly, media and expression."

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich SJ, Archbishop of Luxembourg and current President of COMECE, addressed the concluding session of the study day, stressing that Europe's future -- and that of humanity as a whole -- depends on the family, and that the strength of society can be measured by the practice and cultivation of intergenerational solidarity.