Faith: Catholic
As thousands of unaccompanied migrant children cross the US-Mexico border, Americans are being challenged by how to respond. “This is what our Catholic faith calls us to do,” says John Andrews of the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino County. But in Murrieta, California, Andrea Rockwood has a different perspective: “We need to fix our system before we can even help anybody. We can’t even help our own.” More
Pope Francis visited sacred sites recognized by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, including the Western Wall. He met with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and a range of other religious leaders, made unexpected stops at a terror memorial and at the separation wall that surrounds the West Bank city of Bethlehem, and he inserted himself into the peace process with a surprise invitation to a prayer summit at the Vatican. More
The pope’s pilgrimage is intended on one level to commemorate the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras that ended a thousand years of estrangement between Eastern and Western Christianity. But there are other agendas as well: interfaith dialogue, the Middle East peace process, the diminishing Christian presence in the Holy Land, encounters with Jewish and Palestinian religious and political leaders. More
“Whenever women are treated as inferior in the eyes of God, this is a misinterpretation of what Jesus Christ taught.” Watch more of our conversation with President Carter on women’s rights around the world. More
“In the first thousand years of the Church about 80 popes were made saints. In the next 900 years, just three. There’s this renewed push now to make popes into saints, and that’s not always how it was done in the Church.” More
“The message of the Gospel is not welfare, is not give my people a better madras or give them some more food. It’s to set them free, and setting them free is this whole movement— right-based, dignity for them, their rights, and empowerment.” More
“For a lot of people who are not Christian, some of the rituals may seem obscure. The songs, the rituals, the masses, the liturgies—they’re really carrying us through the story so we can experience it anew for ourselves.” More
President Obama visited Pope Francis for the first time this week (March 27).”The principal focus of the meeting was talking about issues of peace, international issues, and also talking about how to help poor people, how to help the marginalized all over the world,” says Father Tom Reese, an authority on the Vatican and senior analyst for National Catholic Reporter. “This is an area where the pope and President Obama are on the same page.” More
Of all the tourists who go to Israel and its surroundings each year, it’s estimated that more than half of them are Christian pilgrims visiting the holiest sites of the Christian story. It was Pope Clement VI who made the Franciscans the official guardians of these sites seven centuries ago. More
She said the models to follow were the saints, and it was the saints who constantly replenished the church. More