With major Hindu nationalist networks announcing plans to launch a campaign against religious conversions—especially in the tribal areas of India—Catholic Church leaders say such a campaign has been going on for a long time and that the move is aimed at dividing people along religious lines for political gains. The supposed charge: Christians are stealthily...
21 fatalities, including catechist Richard Kisusi, after the last attack in the Beni region In a message to the international Catholic pastoral charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Father José Arieira de Carvalho, a Portuguese Comboni priest who has been living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a decade,...
New massacres by jihadists – number of refugees is growing daily. Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, has been going through a living hell ever since October 2017. In a series of over 600 brutal attacks in nine separate districts of this northern region by armed insurgents, who claim allegiance to the Islamic State,...
“Our Hiroshima”, is how one survivor describes the tragic explosion of 4 August in which she lost her house and home. “It was worse than a war, because it happened so suddenly. All the hard work of years was destroyed in just seven seconds”, says this woman from the devastated quarter of the Lebanese capital...
The case of Arzoo Raja, the 13-year-old Christian girl kidnapped from her family home in the Santo António neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan on 13 October has taken a bright turn as the Sindh Court on November 2, ordered the police to place the young woman in custody [at the women’s shelter Darul Aman] and present...
Sierra Leone has a long story of constant suffering, from bloody civil war and massive poverty, to the Ebola epidemic of 2014 and a string of natural disasters. Today, thanks to ACN’s benefactors, a small ray of light and hope exists. In the Archdiocese of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, 40 priests are helping...
The international head of Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) has expressed horror at the killing of three people just before the start of Mass in France – and called on world leaders to condemn the attack. In a statement made on Thursday, 29th October, Dr Thomas Heine-Geldern, international executive president of Aid to the...
The coronavirus pandemic has left Bethlehem’s tourism-reliant economy in tatters, according to a shop owner, who has appealed to pilgrims, saying he longs for the day when they can safely return. Rony Tabash, owner of the Nativity Store in Bethlehem, told Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) that COVID-19 is the biggest crisis he...
At the weekly General Audience yesterday 27th October, Pope Francis prayed for peace in conflict-ridden parts of Cameroon, in the wake of a school shooting in Kumba which claimed the lives of several school children. The Holy Father expressed sorrow over the tragic murders of at least six students by unidentified gunmen in Kumba, southwest...
The parents of a 13-year-old Christian girl kidnapped in Pakistan have joined forces with a Catholic charity in their struggle to win back their daughter abducted by a man who forced her to marry him and convert to Islam. Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), which supports persecuted Christians, is to provide legal and...
