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A young Israeli rabbi, Yonatan Neril, especially committed to developing the relation between faith and ecology, has taken to heart Pope Francis’ repeated call to take action to protect the environment against climate change. Rabbi Neril is founder and director of the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development in Jerusalem, which just completed a groundbreaking new survey of 48 Catholic seminaries in North America, Rome and the Holy Land aimed at discovering the extent to which these institutions are taking seriously Francis’ warning and plea. ICSD is a nonprofit organization that works to catalyze a transition to a sustainable human society...

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,Once again common sense has been turned on its head in our culture, this time by transgender activists agitating for people to be able to use the bathroom that they feel corresponds emotionally to their self-identified gender rather than the anatomical gender of their biological sex. The issue has emerged prominently in recent national and local news.Obama and the Civil Rights of Transgender People In North Carolina, in response to an ordinance adopted in Charlotte that would have allowed transgender people to use whatever bathroom they wanted, the state legislature passed a law in...

Pope Francis says he has no intention of quitting the papacy — a possibility opened up by his predecessor Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. The pope, responding to a question from a young person at a Vatican event, said on Sunday “I never thought of quitting being pope, or of leaving because of the many responsibilities.” …

Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to the Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos on mount Athos sat in the chair, which previously could only occupy the Byzantine emperors. Putin said about the need to “strengthen the spiritual power of all the Orthodox” and declared the Greek mountain “a source of well-being and grace” for the Russian Orthodox world. Putin visited Athos, having participated in events in honor of the 1000th anniversary of the appearance of Russian monks on the Holy mountain. On the website of the Kremlin promptly a photo gallery, and Greek TV covered the...

MANILA, Philippines — The president-elect of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, recently described the country’s bishops as corrupt and “sons of whores” for allegedly resorting to seeking favors from politicians. During a May 20 press conference, the president-elect described the Catholic Church as “the most hypocritical institution” and insulted the Filipino bishops: “You sons of whores, aren’t you ashamed? You ask for so many favors, even from me.”Currently mayor of Davao City, Duterte has built his political image as a tough leader. Nicknamed  “The Punisher” by Time magazine, Duterte brought law and order to Davao, which was known in the ’70s...

On Wednesday night, 43 Republican members of Congress joined the Democrats to vote for President Barack Obama’s transgender agenda. Whereas last week Congress voted to reject this proposal—known as the Maloney Amendment—last night they voted to ratify Obama’s 2014 executive order barring federal contractors from what it describes as “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in their private employment policies. And, of course, “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity” can be something as simple as having a bathroom policy based on biological sex, not gender identity, as we learned last week from Obama’s transgender directives....

WASHINGTON — Peaceful Muslims who live outside the United States think American society "has gone completely insane" over LGBT issues, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf said on a Monday panel hosted by the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. After discussing President Barack Obama's edict directing all public schools to base their bathroom use policies upon gender identity rather than biological sex, the moderator turned to Yusuf to ask how Muslims view the issue. Even to think about thinking about it is probably difficult for a lot of Muslims. In the Muslim world ... they think we're a society that's gone...

Pilgrims came from other dioceses like Ningbo and Taiyuan. Some groups organised web prayers. Under house arrest since 2012, Mgr Thaddeus Ma Daqin was not present. The Diocese of Shanghai organised a solemn pilgrimage.Shanghai (AsiaNews) – Thousands of Catholics have come on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Sheshan, on the feast day of Mary Help of Christians. But according to the Diocese of Shanghai, the lists of pilgrims include at least 20,000 people who made the journey during the month of May. Others are praying throughout China in their own communities. Since Benedict XVI launched the World...

(Note: When pasting this document into FreeRepublic, it seems that most of the special formatting is lost, such as bold, italics, underlined words. To read the document with the formatting go to the link of the document.) Is the Pope Catholic? - The Greatest Schism in Catholic Church History! Dear friends, As always as I have wrote in the last couple of “Spiritual Food”s, it is very important in these times of great confusion, when even Catholic bishops are no longer in agreement about the fundamentals of our faith and morals, to not only pray much and to study the...

Alexander Kissler is a German author and journalist who is responsible for the Culture Section of the German intellectual journal Cicero. He is also one of the few open critics of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Open Door Politics with regard to the immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. He had, for example, an outcry of indignation after the Cologne incident on New Year’s Eve in 2015, where hundreds of women were aggressively pursued by “North Africans, most of them asylum seekers.” Now he has directed his indignation toward the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis. The cause of...

It's at the top of Drudge right now, "Why Does Everyone Hate Hillary?", some kind of internal Democrat bickering, of no real interest to people out in flyover country. What if Jesus Christ could have saved...Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Margaret Sanger? He does have the power, he just doesn't bully you, if you really don't want him, he won't force himself on you. Hillary can choose to be Jesus' friend. That's between the two of them. Our imaginary hatred of a spectre we call "Hillary" is something in our own heads. Just make sure we put the same choice first in...

The communist authorities have released the priest in his 70's, leader of the struggle for rights and religious freedom. The years in jail have taken their toll physically, but not on his spirit. He is "bright and determined." Activists say his release is a gift to Obama on the eve of his trip to Vietnam.Hanoi (AsiaNews) – Hanoi’s Communist authorities have released Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in his 70s one of the top leaders in the struggle for religious freedom and civil rights in the country. According to some sources, the decision is a "good will" gesture ahead...

SHUITOU, China — Along the valleys and mountains hugging the East China Sea, a Chinese government campaign to remove crosses from church spires has left the countryside looking as if a typhoon had raged down the coast, decapitating buildings at random. In the town of Shuitou, workers used blowtorches to cut a 10-foot-high cross off the 120-foot steeple of the Salvation Church. It now lies in the churchyard, wrapped in a red shroud. About 10 miles to the east, in Mabu township, riot police officers blocked parishioners from entering the grounds of the Dachang Church while workers erected scaffolding and...

The “religious sense” has hit Nat Geo overnight – and the Catholic Church has found itself on center stage.First came a dramatized documentary about Pope Francis and a new series from Morgan Freeman about the “the story of God” (which affirmed the co-existence of faith and science in Catholicism and displayed a kind of “spiritual bond” with Rome).Now, Catholicism is at the center of a very different sort of travelogue, a two-hour special called “Map of Hell.” Donning a silver cross, action anti-hero Danny Trejo (Machete) kicks this special off with some “bad news”: “Someday, we’re all gonna die.”...

As the emotional trumps the rational, people increasingly act on sentiment and subjective desires, often making bad situations even worse. American Bison mother and calf stop traffic in Yellowstone National Park (Photo: Martha Marks | us.fotolia.com) On May 9th at Yellowstone National Park, a bison calf was euthanized. The reason? A tourist, concerned about the welfare of the calf in the cold temperatures, had put it in her SUV. The calf was later rejected by its mother after repeated attempts to return it to the herd. “Rob Heusevelet, another park visitor, said he warned the tourists they didn't need to...

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 17, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – A top Vatican cardinal blasted the transgender bathroom agenda in the United States on Tuesday as diabolical. Cardinal Robert Sarah, the prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Sacraments, said at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., that there are clear signs in the United States of religious persecution and a war against human nature. “Do we not see signs of this insidious war in this great nation of the United States?” Sarah asked.  “In the name of ‘tolerance,’ the Church’s teachings on marriage, sexuality and the human...

The Catholic Church has been on the list for extinction in every totalitarian society in history. In most cases, it has been the number one target but under German National Socialism it was lower, communists & Jews were higher, although there can be no doubt the Church was on the hit list. It’s interesting to speculate why. Here is a version of the famous poem by Gerhard Niemöller. First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I...

Young protesters from the Baltimore uprising share their experience and hope to the Diocese of Maryland convention. Delegates began the work of what reparations for the sin of racism and slavery to determine what that might look like. At its recent convention, the Diocese of Maryland took the first of what could be many small steps to engage the issue of reparations and set aside money to help heal the centuries-old wounds of slavery. Though the resolution that anchored the conversation, known as “Reparations Investment,” was referred to Diocesan Council for further review, its appearance marked a beginning for the...