Free Republic

Fr. Paul describes Christmas celebrations in the former stronghold of the Islamic State. Liturgies on the Nineveh plain "crowded and vibrant". A new Archbishop in Mosul to rebuild the community, on a pastoral and social level. Christians and Muslims against obscurantism, ask for "dialogue and modernity".Mosul (AsiaNews) - If 2014 was "the black year" with the flight of the bishop, priests and faithful following the rise of the Islamic State (IS, ex Isis), then 2019 will be the year "of our rebirth, of pastoral and social challenges, of the return of the refugees," says Fr. Paul Thabit Mekko, the head...

WEED, California, January 10, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – After an American pastor refused to bow to pro-LGBT protesters’ demands that he change his church message board, he found the sign in ruins. Pastor Justin Hoke of Trinity Bible Presbyterian Church in Weed, Siskiyou County, California angered some folks when he put up a message on the marquee outside his church last week reading “Bruce Jenner is still a man. Homosexuality is still a sin. The culture may change. The Bible does not.”Although he normally changes his sign from week to week, Hoke said he would not take down his message until...

The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky bathed in sunset colors. | ANSWERS IN GENESISOne of the nation’s leading atheist legal groups has sent a warning to over 1,000 public school districts telling them not to take field trips to Answers in Genesis' creationist attractions in Kentucky.The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims 31,000 members across the U.S., announced Tuesday that it contacted school districts in five states warning them that field trips to the Ark Encounter or the Creation Museum would be a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.“Public schools and public school staff may not constitutionally organize...

The German government has started to request that those countries register any funding they may provide to mosques in Germany, a report says. The move aims to discourage radicalization in German mosques.The German Foreign Ministry wants Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other Gulf states to register any donations or state subsidies intended for mosques in Germany. According to daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and German broadcasters WDR and NDR, the government has involved both the domestic and foreign intelligence services to monitor who sends the money and who receives it. The Gulf states are also required to alert German authorities if a...

Ahead of next month’s special session on sexuality intended to resolve an issue that has dogged the United Methodist Church for decades, a group of affiliated college and university presidents issued a strong call for full inclusion of LGBTQ Christians. The group, which represents presidents of 93 United Methodist-affiliated colleges and universities, urged the denomination to amend its policies and practices to recognize the “sacred worth” of people regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. The three-paragraph statement won unanimous approval in a vote taken Friday (Jan. 4) by the National Association of Schools and Colleges of The United Methodist...

Construction of the first Christian (Syrian-Orthodox) place of worship of the Republican era should start at the end of February in Yesilkoy, an Istanbul neighbourhood not far from the international airport. It will serve as a point of reference for the city’s 17,000 Assyrians.Istanbul (AsiaNews) – The construction of a Christian church will start in late February in Istanbul, the first since the founding of the modern Turkish republic, said a city official during a meeting with a Syriac Orthodox Church prelate. Freedom of worship is guaranteed in Turkey, but freedom of religion has been violated on various occasions in...

The head of The Episcopal Church has issued a partial restriction on the ministry of a New York bishop who recently refused to allow same-sex wedding ceremonies at his diocese. Bishop William Love of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany released a pastoral letter last year stating his refusal to follow a recently passed resolution mandating that all regional bodies in The Episcopal Church perform same-sex marriages. A spokesperson for The Episcopal Church directed The Christian Post to a statement released Friday by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, who supports same-sex marriage and leads the mainline Protestant denomination. “During the period of...

The Chinese government is going after elementary and high schools to teach students that atheism, not religion, is the best belief system.The Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, is indoctrinating the young minds, starting a movement to boycott religion on school campuses, using the typical means of threats and intimidation to achieve its ultimate goal of eradicating religion. Bitter Winter received witness accounts about the growing anti-religion attitude in schools across provinces in China. In order to stop students from participating in religion, the Education Department of Heping district, in Shenyang city of the northeastern province of Liaoning, issued an edict...

The data emerged from the latest report of the Central Statistics Department. There are about 175 thousand Christians today in Israel, equal to 2% of the population. The population increase of 2.2%. 78.5% of the 12-year-olds graduated from secondary education, just under 70% of the active population.Jerusalem (AsiaNews) - A Christian population that is growing, even with a lower child birth rate compared with Jews and Muslims, thanks also to the arrival of migrant workers. A good level of education among young people, with a figure that almost equals the Jewish majority and a percentage of increasingly significant active participation...

Washington D.C., Jan 10, 2019 / 05:13 pm (CNA).- An allegation of misconduct against Archbishop Theodore McCarrick was reported to Cardinal Donald Wuerl in 2004, despite Wuerl’s insistence he knew nothing about McCarrick’s alleged sexual misconduct until 2018. Wuerl forwarded the report to the apostolic nuncio in Washington, DC, the Diocese of Pittsburgh said Thursday. A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Washington confirmed to CNA that an allegation against McCarrick was presented to Wuerl while he served as Bishop of Pittsburgh, as part of a complaint made by laicized priest Robert Ciolek. In a statement, the Diocese of Pittsburgh said...

Will Pope Francis Canonize Socialist Bishop Who Supported Armed Struggle? The Left is cheering on the canonization movement for Dom Helder Camara Around the time of Vatican II, a group of socialist bishops signed a secret manifesto called the Pact of the Catacombs. It received its name from having been signed at a church near the catacombs in Rome. Most of the signatories of the secret manifesto came from Latin America. According to the text of the Pact of the Catacombs, the bishops pledged to politicize the Church for the sake of ushering in the "advent of another social order."...

Andy Stanley preaches to an estimated 33,000 people every Sunday at North Point Ministries' five metro-Atlanta campuses. | Photo courtesy of North Point MinistriesChristians should quit erecting Ten Commandments displays and should instead consider making monuments dedicated to the Sermon on the Mount, popular pastor Andy Stanley said.In a column published by Relevant Magazine, the North Point Community Church pastor argued that the Ten Commandments are “the old covenant” and no longer apply to believers."[I]f we’re going to create a monument to stand as a testament to our faith, shouldn’t it at least be a monument of something that actually...

* Students claim John Finnis, 77, attacked same-sex relations in essays published* Campaigners launched a petition and say his presence threatens gay people * However, Oxford has supported his right to academic freedomStudents are demanding Oxford University sacks a Roman Catholic professor for allegedly criticising homosexuality. They claim essays published by John Finnis, 77, emeritus professor of law and legal philosophy, attack same-sex relations and are ‘discriminatory’. Campaigners say his presence on campus threatens gay people, and a petition demanding his removal from his academic position has 350 backers so far. However, Oxford has supported his right to academic freedom....

Socci: The Church is collapsing, but the Vatican has launched a crusade against Salvini What is going on in the Catholic Church? The situation is not only catastrophic - it’s absurd.  We hear of churches emptying dramatically in the West and Christians being cruelly persecuted in the East. We hear of the disappearance of traditional Catholic movements, of internal clashes in the Curia, of continuous scandals, of immense confusion among the faithful as a result of Pope Francis’ revolutionary feats ( recently he even “forgot” about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception). Yet the churchmen are not addressing any...

A Colorado baker who already won a U.S. Supreme Court case may proceed with a second lawsuit claiming the state of Colorado is again wrongly prosecuting him, this time for declining to bake a cake celebrating a “gender transition,” a federal court ruled Friday. Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, was plaintiff in a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled he was wrongfully prosecuted for declining to bake a cake marking a same-sex wedding ceremony on the grounds that doing so would violate his religious beliefs. While the state of Colorado has...

GALWAY, Ireland, January 7, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The euphoria of the “Yes” campaign on winning the Irish abortion referendum last May is turning decidedly sour. Not only are those who campaigned for a ‘yes’ vote complaining that the measures that have been rapidly introduced by a compliant government to kill the unborn are not enough, the same people who campaigned for freedom from the then existing restrictions on abortion now wish to restrict the rights of those morally opposed to abortion. The strategy by which the pro-abortion side wish to silence debate on abortion is through censorship zones, similar to...

There is ONLY One who is RIGHTEOUS and GAVE himself for the sins and transgressions of the whole world. That One is the Son of Almighty God Jesus Christ. The Bible states; "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved" (John 3:16-17). "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to...

Beth Moore. | (Photo: Facebook)Popular Bible teacher and author Beth Moore has sparked a fiery debate online about whether spending time reading the Bible is the same thing as spending time with God.“Spending time with God and spending time with the Bible are not the same thing. The Bible is the Word of God, crucial to knowing Him, but it’s not God. We can study our Bibles till the 2nd coming & leave God completely out of it. We can grow in facts & never grow a whit in faith,” Moore declared in an initial tweet on the subject...

Chinese communist authorities forced a church in China’s Henan Province to take down the first of the Ten Commandments given to Moses, as it was deemed offensive.Bitter Winter Magazine, which reports on religious freedom violations in China, said that the incident occurred in November, when 30 officials conducted an inspection of a government-approved Three-Self church in Henan’s Luoning county.Inside the church, they saw the Ten Commandments displayed on the wall, and declared that the first commandment must be removed and proceeded to wipe it off.The Ten Commandments, given by God to the Jewish people through Moses, became the bedrock of...

The Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) has confirmed it will begin performing abortions in Ireland on January 7.Abortion officially became legal in the Republic of Ireland on December 20, when President Michael D. Higgins signed new legislation into law. In May, a campaign to save the country’s Eighth Amendment – which banned abortion – overwhelmingly lost in a referendum vote. A pro-abortion rights campaign revealed by DCLeaks.com in 2017 to have been funded, in part, by billionaire investor George Soros and his Open Society Foundation proved successful as referendum exit polls suggested many voters relied on the abortion industry and...