IRAQ Bartella comes back to life as displaced Christians begin to return “This is our city, our life, our history”, they say excitedly. In the villages of the Nineveh Plain, which were occupied and looted between 2014 and 2016 by Islamic State(IS), the smell of fresh paint finally replaces the stench of burning. In...
TOGO More classrooms to cope with huge demand for catechism and literacy Togo is a country in West Africa with an ethnically diverse population of 6.3 million. The diocese of Dapaong lies in the far north of the country, in a region bordering on the Sahel zone. The desert is encroaching ever further into this...
Pope Paul VI and Oscar Romero to be canonised At a meeting with Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, Pope Francis signed decrees for the causes of 13 men and women — among them Pope Paul V! and Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, The Vatican announced that Pope Francis has...
IRAQ Fear persists in Mosul where ISIS “robbed and demolished every church” A Christian woman has spoken of her heartbreak seeing Mosul’s desecrated churches – and remains fearful of Daesh (ISIS) collaborators in the city. Nadia Younis Butti, who returned to Mosul, northern Iraq, for the first time since Daesh seized it in summer 2014,...
BOSNIA A creeping threat to the existence of Catholics in the country The Balkan state of Bosnia and Herzegovina has long since disappeared from the headlines. Officially, the war there ended with the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995. But the wounds of the war are still very much in evidence and continue to...
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC Baptist elder and aid workers massacred by Islamic rebels Six aid workers, including a Christian father of seven, were massacred in an ambush by armed militants in the Central African Republic. 66-year-old Gabriel Ole, who served as a church elder for a Baptist church in the capital of Bangui, lost his life...
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC 1,000 Muslims seek refuge in a church from militia waiting to kill them More than 1,000 Muslims have been hiding from a hostile militia inside a Roman Catholic Church at a compound in Bangassou, Central African Republic. While some media reports say the militia is mostly made up of Christians, Catholic sources are...
VATICAN Pope Francis to visit 3 Baltic countries in September The Vatican has announced that Pope Francis will visit Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on 22-25 Sep. The Pope is expected to visit Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuania; Riga and Aglona in Latvia, and Tallinn in Estonia. The logo and motto for the Papal visit...
EGYPT Cathedral dedicated to beheaded Coptic martyrs is inaugurated Three years after the massacre of the 21 young Copts, a cathedral for the “martyrs of the faith” was completed in recent months. It is located in the small village of Al Ur in the province of Minya, the birthplace of the majority of the dead,...
CHINA Another church damaged despite a historic agreement with the Vatican Just a few weeks after the meeting between the Chinese and Vatican delegations, which reportedly resulted in the drafting of a “historic” agreement on the nominations of bishops in the Chinese Catholic Church, reports are emerging of attacks on churches in a few areas...
