From the most humble of beginnings, the small and more than occasionally fractured community of Swan River Catholics struggled to grow, suffering along with other non-Catholic colonials from the isolation of their new home. It was a stagnation, however, which would not last, writes Hal Colebatch.
Pope Francis, like Islam’s Sufi mystic theologians and poets, “is trying to do good for the sake of the Good One, motivated by love and compassion,” said the president of the Islamic Affairs Council of Maryland.
As efforts to recover the bodies of migrants who drowned off Italy’s southern coast continued, Pope Francis again asked people to pray for the victims and he sent his almoner to Lampedusa to pray over the 194 corpses recovered as of Oct. 6 and to visit the survivors.
Caritas chapters across Mexico have collected everything from canned goods to clothing for the victims of Hurricanes Ingrid and Manuel, which battered both coasts, cost more than 100 lives and left thousands homeless, incommunicado and possibly even buried beneath mudslides.
Peace is so difficult to find because men and women struggle to stop focusing on their own interests long enough to listen to and learn from others, Pope Francis said.
A young priest who was murdered by communist partisans during a wave of anti-church violence in 1947 was beatified as a martyr in Croatia.
Pope Francis made his international advisory panel on church governance a permanent council of cardinals, thereby emphasizing the importance and open-endedness of its work among his pontificate’s various efforts at reform.
Thousands of previously middle-class Syrians now stranded in Armenia are rapidly running out of resources and could soon have no shelter, food or medicine, said an international aid group official.
In his latest wide-ranging interview, Pope Francis said that he aimed to make the Catholic Church less “Vatican-centric” and closer to the “people of God,” as well as more socially conscious and open to modern culture.
Ahmad is head nurse at the mobile hospital, which officially opened Sept. 13. The doctors, nurses and support staff at the new hospital are all Syrian. They all left Syria reluctantly, fleeing the fighting that began in 2011. They saw the hospitals where they worked bombed, homes where they lived destroyed and sniper fire in Aleppo picking off one or two random civilians per day.