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Police make four arrests after intercepting communications between jihadist group and Moroccan-born man. Italian prosecutors said Thursday they had thwarted plans by at least three people to carry out terror attacks against the Israeli Embassy in Rome and the Vatican.

On 22 April, Cardinal Walter Kasper gave yet another interview about Pope Francis and his reforms. This time, he spoke with the German regional newspaper Aachener Zeitung. In this interview, the German cardinal made some candid — indeed, bold — statements which are very important in the context of the current situation of the Catholic Church. Kasper speaks about the further Church-reform plans of Pope Francis and his intention “not to preserve everything as it has been of old.” With Pope Francis, “things are not any more so abstract and permeated with suspicion, as it was the case in earlier...

POPE FRANCIS ABANDONS CHRISTIAN SYRIAN REFUGEES, TAKES ONLY MUSLIMS TO VATICAN INSTEAD Spokesman Massimiliano Signifredi called the incident 'regrettable' - adding: 'The problem here is the three Syrians arrived after the March 20 deadline. They arrived just after the agreement between the European Union and Turkey. Mr Signifredi said: 'Our staff went to Lesbos and spoke with the people who were selected. But everything was decided by the Vatican. CHRISTIAN BROTHER AND SISTER REFUGEES FROM SYRIA SAY THEY HAVE BEEN ‘LET DOWN’ BY POPE FRANCIS AFTER HE LEFT THEM BEHIND IN A LESBOS REFUGEE CAMP DESPITE PROMISES THEY WOULD BE...

ROME — Just what is it that the Vatican does not get about predator priests? Apparently a lot. Father Joseph Jeyapaul is a priest from India who admitted to raping two adolescent girls in Minnesota when he served the Crookston diocese from 2004 to 2005. After being charged with the abuse, which included rape and forcing at least one of the girls to perform fellatio on him, he fled home to India, where he was eventually arrested on an Interpol warrant. He was then extradited back to Minnesota, where he admitted his heinous crimes and entered a plea bargain in...

Just over four months since the Vatican announced that the Vatican would be subjected to an external audit by one of the world’s leading accounting firms, the Secretariat of State has said that it is pulling the plug on the initiative. The Vatican announced the decision to suspend the audit, carried out by accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, in a letter sent to all Vatican entities this week.

Did you see that Sen. Bernie Sanders released his income taxes?....well, his 2014 income taxes, anyway. He did it around 7 p.m. on a Friday night, on the same day that the Democratic presidential hopeful was making international headlines by speaking at the Vatican and meeting Pope Francis, for at least a handshake. In journalism, releasing information at that off hour is what we call "a Friday news dump" -- usually an attempt to bury bad news. That's weird, because if I were handling PR for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I'd be shouting the news from the Green Mountain-tops. They...

In a political season already chock-full of strange moments, another one took place last week when Bernie Sanders bailed out on the Empire State campaign trail to jet across the ocean to Rome. He was off to see the Pope, or so we were told. But before Bernie had even touched down near Vatican City I saw conflicting reports that His Holiness didn’t have the Vermont Senator on his schedule. Then the meeting was back on again, but reduced to a quick bit of face time in passing. In the end, Sanders did get to meet with Pope Francis, if...

Pope Francis greets a group of Syrian refugees upon landing at Rome's Ciampino airport April 16, 2016. The Vatican City population of about 800 grew by 12 as Pope Francis put three families of Syrian refugees aboard the papal plane before leaving Greece.The Vatican said in a statement that the pope "desired to make a gesture of welcome regarding refugees" by taking in the families, which include six children. "These are all people who were already in camps in Lesbos before the agreement between the European Union and Turkey.""The Pope's initiative was brought to fruition through negotiations carried out by...

Pope Francis said his brief encounter Saturday with U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was a sign of good manners, “nothing more,” and hardly evidence of interfering in American politics. […] “This morning when I left, Sen. Sanders was there. … He knew I was leaving at that time and I had the kindness to greet him and his wife and another couple who were with them,” the pope told reporters traveling back with him to the Vatican. “When I came down, I greeted them, shook their hands and nothing more. This is good manners. It’s called good manners and not...

Pope Francis has taken 12 Syrian migrants back with him to the Vatican after visiting a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. The three families boarded the papal jet as the pontiff departed following his trip......

Bernie Sanders issued a global call to action at the Vatican on Friday to address “immoral and unsustainable” wealth inequality and poverty, using the high-profile gathering to echo one of the central platforms of his presidential campaign. The Democratic senator from Vermont cited Pope Francis and St. John Paul II repeatedly during his speech to the Vatican conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of a landmark teaching document from John Paul on social and economic justice after the Cold War. […] “We don’t choose to politicize the pope,” Sanders told attendees, “but his spirit and courage and the fact, if I...

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders arrived in Rome on Friday to attend a Vatican conference steeped in his lifelong passions of economic and social justice, briefly departing New York just days before its critical primary to show solidarity with the teachings of Pope Francis. Sanders made the trip hours after Thursday night's Brooklyn debate with rival Hillary Clinton and said the opportunity to address the Vatican conference was too meaningful to pass up. The roughly 24-hour visit will precede a crucial New York primary against the former secretary of state on Tuesday.

It’s a somewhat obscure apocalyptic novel, much overlooked since its publication in 1907, and yet it comes with a recommendation that just about any best-selling author would covet: the spiritual leader of the whole world says it’s a good read. And not just the current pope, the previous one too.Pope Francis raised eyebrows in 2013 and again in 2015 when he recommended Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World to the faithful as a book that depicts a “globalization of hegemonic uniformity.” Similarly, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, referred to the Universalism depicted in Lord of the...

Pastoral Discernment and Dead Members “Alive” - Francis' Exhortation mortal_sin_cfn Francis' Apostolic Exhortation: Pastoral Discernment and Dead Members “Alive” “In the case of divorcees who have remarried, we posed the question, what do we do with them? … let us open the doors a bit more... Why can’t they be godfathers and godmothers ? … Things need to change, our standards need to change.” - Pope Francis By John Vennari www.cfnews.org The Vatican has sent a letter to the world’s bishop with instructions on how to prepare the faithful for Francis’ post-Synodal Exhortation. Francis’ document, said to run about 200...

Pope Francis has just published his long-awaited Apostolic Exhortation on the Family, Amoris Laetitia. In it, he repeats many of the problematic and controversial statements of the previous 2014 and 2015 Synods of Bishops on the Family. Among these, one finds the law of gradualism with regard to sinful relationships, the claim that there are “seeds” of goodness in such relationships that are objectively contrary to God’s laws, and a general tone of not speaking of sin at all with regard to those ways of living that put the soul of the persistent sinner gravely at risk of not attaining...

Twelve Things that Caught My Eye about Pope Francis’s New Document on Love and Marriage and Family By KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ April 8, 2016 For search-engine optimization, I thought about titling this post: “What Pope Francis Has to Say to Kim Kardashian about Her Dad Caitlyn.” I didn’t, but I imagined had Pope Benedict XVI issued the document Pope Francis did on marriage and family and society and accompaniment and reconciliation, the headlines might have read a lot differently, even with the same text. (I also never would use that title because while it might work on Google it’s not...

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has accepted an invitation from the Pope to the Vatican. Mr Sanders, who is Jewish, accepted an invitation to Rome for a conference at the end of next week. The Vatican visit is four days before the primary contest in New York, a competitive battle between him and front-runner Hillary Clinton.

In his general audience Wednesday, Pope Francis launched an appeal to the nations of the world to open their hearts and their doors to migrants who are standing “at the border,” in an apparent reference to the many migrants camped at key border positions trying to enter Europe.

March 16, 2016 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- On March 16, speaking publicly on a rare occasion, Pope Benedict XVI gave an interview to Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops' Conference, in which he spoke of a “two-sided deep crisis” the Church is facing in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The report has already hit Germany courtesy of Vaticanist Guiseppe Nardi, of the German Catholic news website Katholisches.info. Pope Benedict reminds us of the formerly indispensable Catholic conviction of the possibility of the loss of eternal salvation, or that people go to hell: The missionaries of the 16th...

The Vatican committee that approves elevations to sainthood will meet Tuesday to consider a recommendation that Mother Teresa of Calcutta becomes Saint Teresa, the Holy See announced on Monday. With the long-awaited decision seen as a formality, Pope Francis is expected to sign a decree approving the canonisation of the 1979 Nobel peace prize winner and set a date and venue for it to happen.