Standing in the Assyrian Catholic cathedral in Baghdad where 50 worshippers, clergy, and policemen were killed in a 2010 terrorist attack, Pope Francis on Friday made an appeal for “forgiveness, reconciliation, and rebirth” in the struggling Middle Eastern nation.
Pope Francis arrived in Iraq on Friday in a first-ever papal visit to the country that is expected to raise awareness about the challenges facing Iraqi Christians, who are a dwindling minority in the nation.
A Catholic nun, kneeling before armed forces in Myanmar and begging them not to open fire on protesters, has become a symbol for the protests against the military coup that destabilized the country in February.
About 300 refugees from a Christian minority community from Myanmar held a demonstration in India’s capital on Wednesday against last month’s military takeover in their country and demanded the immediate release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other Myanmar leaders.
A female Jehovah’s Witness has been sentenced to two years in a Russian prison for practicing her faith, marking the first time the country has imprisoned a woman since a 2017 ruling that declared the faith group “extremist.” Valentina Baranovskaya, 69, was sentenced Wednesday along with
President Mahmoud Abbas has guaranteed that at least seven seats of a new legislative council will go to Christians in the elections in the occupied territories to be held May 22. The measure would give Christians an outsized representation on the council.
Tanzania’s COVID-denying president is calling on citizens for three days of prayer to defeat unnamed “respiratory diseases” amid warnings that the country is seeing a deadly resurgence in infections.
Fighting in Tigray, a semi-autonomous state in northern Ethiopia, resulted in massacres at ancient religious sites as the country’s military battled the forces of the ruling party in the state, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Long-simmering suspicions between Orthodox and evangelical Christians have blown up recently over the refusal of the Jordanian government to allow evangelical churches full legal standing under the country's religiously-divided judicial system.
The Vatican is calling for a new paradigm of care for older people after what it calls the “massacre” wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately killed people living in nursing homes.