Category Archives: Christianity

Texas anti-abortion law shows ‘terrifying’ fragility of women’s rights, say activists

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Campaigners fear ban emboldens anti-choice governments as more aggressive opposition, better organised and funded, spreads from US

The new anti-abortion law in Texas is a “terrifying” reminder of the fragility of hard-won rights, pro-choice activists have said, as they warn of a “more aggressive, much better organised [and] better funded” global opposition movement.

Pro-choice campaigners have seen several victories in recent years, including in Ireland, Argentina and, most recently, Mexico, where the supreme court ruled last week that criminalising abortion was unconstitutional. Another is hoped for later this month when the tiny enclave of San Marino, landlocked within Italy, holds a highly charged referendum.

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‘Don’t pass Catholic churches’: protests as Glasgow braces for Orange walks

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Campaigners call for parades to be re-routed as up to 13,000 people expected to converge in city centre

Campaigners against anti-Catholic bigotry and anti-Irish discrimination will gather in protest around vulnerable churches on Saturday, as Glasgow braces itself for the largest gathering of Orange marchers since the pandemic.

More than 30 of the controversial Protestant parades will converge in the city centre to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the first Battle of the Boyne parade, with potential turnout estimated from 5,000 to 13,000. Hundreds of police officers are expected to be deployed on the day, with 32 streets closed until mid-afternoon to facilitate the marchers.

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Pope urges Hungary to ‘extend its arms to everyone’ in veiled Orbán critique

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Pontiff’s statement at start of four-day central Europe tour at odds with far-right PM’s anti-migrant stance

Pope Francis has urged Hungary to “extend its arms towards everyone” in an apparent veiled critique of Viktor Orbán’s anti-migrant policies, as the pontiff began a four-day visit to central Europe in his first big international outing since undergoing intestinal surgery in July.

Francis, 84, appeared in good form during his visit to Budapest, presiding over a lengthy mass and standing as he waved to crowds from his open-sided popemobile. He used a golf cart to avoid walking long distances indoors and confessed at one point that he had to sit because “I’m not 15 any more”. But otherwise he kept up the typical gruelling pace of a papal trip.

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From Lagos to Winchester: how a divisive Nigerian pastor built a global following

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I first encountered TB Joshua as a teenager, when his preaching captivated my evangelical Christian community in Hampshire. Many of my friends became his ardent disciples and followed him to Lagos. How did he have such a hold over people?

On the second day of TB Joshua’s funeral in Lagos, his disciples took to the stage. A microphone was passed around as more than 60 disciples introduced themselves by name and nationality. They came from 18 different countries, among them Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, the US and the UK. Some seemed barely out of their teens; others were in late middle age, having spent decades serving Joshua, the millionaire Nigerian pastor and self-proclaimed prophet being laid to rest. A senior Nigerian disciple, recently promoted to prophetess, began her tribute. “How to describe someone so indescribable?” she said. “How to define someone so indefinable? Human and divine?”

Joshua died on 5 June 2021, a few days before his 58th birthday. The news spread on social media, before the Synagogue, Church of All Nations, known as Scoan, made an official announcement. “God has taken His servant Prophet TB Joshua home,” the statement read, “as it should be by divine will.” Over a month later, his funeral under way, there had been no mention of a cause of death.

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‘Cultural genocide’: mapping the shameful history of Canada’s residential schools

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Recent discoveries of mass graves have shed new light on the country’s troubled colonial legacy

In May, Canadians were shocked at the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the site of a former school in British Columbia. The bodies belonged to Indigenous children, some believed to be as young as three years old, who went through Canada’s state-sponsored “residential school” system. The schools, scattered across the country, were aimed at eradicating the culture and languages of the country’s Indigenous populations.

The findings have brought the world’s renewed attention to this shameful chapter of Canadian history, left deep wounds in hundreds of communities and sparked fresh demands for justice aimed at the Canadian government and the churches that ran the schools for decades.

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‘Cardinal Keith O’Brien was like God to me. Then he tried to seduce me’: the whistleblower’s tale

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As disgraced cardinal Theodore McCarrick faces trial in the US, an ex-priest tells of how he testified against the Scottish cardinal

As disgraced 91-year-old cardinal Theodore McCarrick stood in an American court last week, charged with three counts of indecent assault and battery on a minor, the spectre of the late Scottish cardinal, Keith O’Brien, hovered silently over proceedings. Two elderly men, who once donned scarlet robes and mitres, who reached the pinnacle of Catholic church power, stripped to civvies. McCarrick pleaded not guilty to the charges.

O’Brien, the UK’s then most senior Catholic cleric, and a vocal opponent of gay rights, resigned in 2013 after the Observer revealed details of his sexually inappropriate behaviour with priests in his diocese.

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Pope inadvertently quotes Vladimir Putin in Afghanistan comment

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Francis ‘moved’ by Angela Merkel’s words on western intervention – in fact said by Russian president

Pope Francis has criticised the west’s recent involvement in Afghanistan – inadvertently quoting Vladimir Putin in doing so.

In a wide-ranging interview with Spanish radio station COPE, the pope was asked for his thoughts on the redrawn political map of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the US and its allies from the country after 20 years of war.

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Brazil’s first transgender pastor: ‘All humans have flaws, being trans isn’t one of them’

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In a country with shocking brutality against LGBTQ+ people, Alexya Salvador is using her faith to help others like her

Desperate calls from LGBTQ+ youths contemplating suicide or from their parents after they have made an attempt on their lives often punctuate Alexya Salvador’s day. When they do, she drops everything to talk.

As a transgender woman, she recognises the anguish in their voices. “I feel their pain in my body because I went through this,” she says. “My family went through this.”

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French police question man who reportedly admitted killing priest

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Father Olivier Maire had offered a home to the accused who was awaiting trial for cathedral arson

A man is being questioned by police after he reportedly admitted killing a priest who had offered him a home while awaiting trial for arson.

The suspect walked into a gendarmerie in the Vendée in western France on Monday morning and allegedly told officers he had killed the cleric, the head of a Catholic religious order.

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Even a priest in Brazil is not spared rage of Bolsonaro supporters

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Far-right congregants fumed at clergyman after he criticised president over Covid in his service

The toxic politics bedevilling Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil swept into Father Lino Allegri’s sacristy one Sunday in July, just after the octogenarian priest delivered a homily lamenting the president’s role in the Covid catastrophe that has killed more than half a million Brazilians.

As Allegri removed his white cassock, eight enraged congregants stormed into the rectangular backroom, past a portrait of Mother Teresa bearing the words: “The most dangerous person: the lie. The worst feeling: hate.”

“Go back to Italy! We don’t want you here!” witnesses remember one of the Bolsonaro-supporting intruders ranting at the Verona-born priest, a naturalised Brazilian citizen who has lived in the South American country for more than 50 years.

“Our president is a Christian! A good man! An honest man!” fumed another, jabbing a finger into the 82-year-old clergyman’s face.

Allegri said he had never suffered such an aggressive post-service diatribe.

“We felt bewildered,” he recalled on a recent Sunday as he sat in the same vestry where he had been harangued by the pro-Bolsonaro mob. Three armed police officers loitered on the street outside to deter another breach.

Another church member shook their head sorrowfully as they remembered watching the Bolsonarista churchgoers berate the elderly priest. “It’s fanaticism, there’s no other word for it … an incomprehensible fanaticism,” said the witness, who asked not to be named out of fear for their own security.

“Father Lino is so loved by all of us here. He brings us peace,” they added. “I just felt so utterly sad at the point our country has reached.”

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Lucia Mantione: murdered Sicilian girl finally given funeral after 66 years

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Catholic church had denied 13-year-old girl sexually assaulted and killed in 1955 a funeral due to arcane rule

There had never been so many people at a funeral in the history of Montedoro, a village suspended in time among wheat fields and abandoned sulphur mines in central Sicily.

Its 1,500 inhabitants had waited for this moment for more than half a century, and on Wednesday gathered in hundreds in solemn prayer in the village church around a small white coffin.

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‘Nobody can gaslight us’: the rappers confronting Canada’s colonial horrors

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The recent discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools is the latest incident in decades of trauma for Indigenous Canadians, who are using lyricism to process it

After the recent discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former Canadian residential schools, Drezus – an rapper of Cree and Ojibwe heritage from the Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan province – grew unsure about his longstanding plans to release a new music video, Bless. He starts the song by calling the atrocities his people have faced “an act of war”, then follows that with bar after bar of Indigenous empowerment. Unsure if that would be appropriate while his people grieved, he turned to his mother, who had attended one of those schools. Her advice? “Release it, son. We need it now.”

This government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system was established in Canada in the late 1800s. Its founders’ intent: to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report detailed nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students, along with 3,200 documented deaths. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease.

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Revealed: the secrets of Seville cathedral’s banquet set in stone

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Painstaking research deciphers carvings of religious bounty dating back almost five centuries

For almost 500 years, the arch that connects the largest Gothic cathedral in the world with its Renaissance sacristy has offered visitors a sumptuous, if little glimpsed – and even less studied – vision of religious bounty.

The 68 beautifully carved plates of food that adorn the archway in Seville’s cathedral offer rather more than bread and wine.

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Vatican reveals it owns more than 5,000 properties

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Real estate holdings published for first time show it owns 4,051 properties in Italy, 1,120 abroad

The Vatican has released information on its real estate holdings for the first time, revealing it owns more than 5,000 properties, as part of its most detailed financial disclosures ever.

The information released on Saturday was contained in two documents – a consolidated financial statement for 2020 for the Holy See and the first ever public budget for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (Apsa).

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Pope Francis goes to hospital for scheduled surgery on colon

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Vatican says pontiff will undergo operation for diverticular stenosis of the colon

Pope Francis has been admitted to a hospital in Rome for scheduled surgery on his large intestine, the Vatican has said. The news came just three hours after the pope had cheerfully greeted the public in St Peter’s Square and told them he would visit Hungary and Slovakia in September.

The brief statement from the Holy See’s press office did not say exactly when the surgery would be performed at the Gemelli Polyclinic, a Catholic teaching hospital, only that there would be a medical update when the surgery was complete. However, sources indicated that the surgery would be carried out later on Sunday.

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Burned churches stir deep Indigenous ambivalence over faith of forefathers

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After hundreds of unmarked graves were found at Canada’s former Catholic-run residential schools, churches in First Nations territories have been destroyed by suspected arson

For more than a century, the clapboard church set amid rolling hills in western Canada has been a spiritual home to the Upper Similkameen Indian Band.

To build St Anne’s, residents of Chuchuwayha Indian Reserve #2 travelled 40 miles to the closest town, hauling lumber back to their community by horse and wagon.

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My relatives went to a Catholic school for Native children. It was a place of horrors | Nick Estes

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After the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former school for Native children in Canada, it is time to investigate similar abuses in the US

There is so much mourning Native people have yet to do. The full magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood, especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American Indian boarding schools. The purpose of the schools was “civilization”, but, as I have written elsewhere, boarding schools served to provide access to Native land, by breaking up Native families and holding children hostage so their nations would cede more territory. And one of the primary benefactors of the boarding school system is the Catholic church, which is today the world’s largest non-governmental landowner, with roughly 177 million acres of property throughout the globe. Part of the evidence of how exactly the church acquired its wealth in North America is literally being unearthed, and it exists in stories of the Native children whose lives it stole, which includes my own family.

The full magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood, especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American Indian boarding schools

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Canada: two more Catholic churches on First Nations reserves destroyed by fire

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  • Investigators treating fires in British Columbia as suspicious
  • Anger over church’s historical role in forced assimilation

Two more Catholic churches on First Nations reserves in western Canada have been destroyed by fires that investigators are once again treating as suspicious.

Over the weekend, crews in southern British Columbia responded to early morning blazes at St Ann’s Church on Upper Similkameen Indian Band land, and the Chopaka Church on the lands of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band. Both churches, built from wood and more than 100 years old, were burned to the ground.

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Vatican urges Italy to stop proposed anti-homophobia law

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Law calls into question the church’s ‘freedom of organisation’ and threatens ‘freedom of thought’, letter claims

The Vatican has made an unprecedented intervention urging the Italian government to change a proposed law that would criminalise homophobia over concerns it will infringe upon the Catholic church’s “freedom of thought”.

A letter delivered by British archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary of relations with states, said parts of the legislation violated a treaty made between Italy and the Catholic church in the 1920s that secured the freedoms and rights of the church, Corriere della Sera reported.

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Biden threatened with communion ban over position on abortion

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US bishops vote to stop pro-choice Catholics receiving eucharist

Roman Catholic bishops in the US have voted to press ahead with moves that could result in Joe Biden being banned from receiving communion because of his stance on abortion, and that risks increasing tensions in a divided church.

After three days of online debate, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted by three to one to draft new guidance on the eucharist. The unexpected strength of support for the move among the bishops was a rebuff to the Vatican, which had signalled its opposition.

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