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As the temperature in Mecca reached 125.24° F. (51.8° C.) on Tuesday, word leaked out that nearly 600 pilgrims had died of heat stroke and 2,000 have been hospitalised for treatment. A virtual clinic treated more thousands remotely. Some 324 of the dead were Egyptians, while dozens were from Jordan. The season of the annual Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, just ended. Some 1.8 million pilgrims participated. Eyewitnesses said that not all the dead were elderly, that young persons died, as well. Pilgrims carry out a series of rituals during the pilgrimage, beginning with preparing themselves...

[Catholic Caucus] How to Plant Christendom In Your Parish Community Next YearThere is a shift among faithful Catholics – it is the desire to renew their faith through prayers, penance, and fasting. The desire to grow closer to God is beyond anything the superficial world can offer the soul. Yet, the spiritual world combined with the natural world can offer quite a penitential and cleansing experience. On May 27-29th, around 16,000 pilgrims traveled on foot from the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris (originally, it began at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris before it burned) to the Cathedral of...

[Catholic Caucus] “The True Meaning of Our Liturgies” (and the Meaning of Chartres, the Largest Pilgrimage in Europe) - by Fr. Luc de BellescizeIn this beautiful meditation, Father Luc de Bellescize, a priest of the Diocese of Paris, looks back on the difficult post-conciliar years and their abuses, on the extraordinary success of the Chartres Pilgrimage, on the thirst for transcendence, on the mystery of the Trinity, and on the true meaning of the liturgy. La NefJune 6, 2023My grandfather was a Lefebvrist. He was not present at my baptism or ordination. He had organized dozens of retreats for men....

A historic pilgrimage route believed to be the oldest in Japan has formed a friendship tie-up with the world-famous Routes of Santiago de Compostela, with the aim of increasing global name recognition for both through cooperation that transcends their different religions. The Saikoku Kannon Pilgrimage officially signed an agreement with the Santiago de Compostela, a World Heritage Site, at the Spanish Embassy in Tokyo on Tuesday. The 1,000-kilometer Saikoku route comprises 33 Buddhist temples worshipping Kannon Bodhisattva, and stretches across seven prefectures, including Osaka, Kyoto and Wakayama...

A new tourist route called “The Christian Crimea” is being developed as part of the national tourist project "Tourism and the hospitality industry" in Crimea. This issue was discussed at a meeting between the Russian Federation Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Chernyshenko, and the Chairman of the Patriarchal Council for Culture, Metropolitan Tikhon of Pskov and Porkhov, RIA Novosti reports. After the meeting, Dmitry Chernyshenko gave a number of directions, suggesting that a tourist and pilgrimage destination — a national tourist route called “the Christian Crimea” — should be developed as part of a large-scale tourist project in Crimea. For its...

...The decision of the High Administrative Court opens the way for Hagia Sophia to become a mosque again, that will fill many Turkish Muslims with joy; after all, they have been waiting for so long to “break the chains” of Hagia Sophia and enter the place for free as they do with any other place of their faith. ...That, however, is not the view from outside Turkey. As the issue started gathering momentum this year, especially following the special celebrations organized in front of the monument for the 567th anniversary of its conquest. Christians around the world, Byzantine scholars or...

This is the sacred, peaceful place in the United States where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared. It is a humble, quiet place of refuge, noble in simplicity, located at the core of a tri-county region in the heart of agricultural country in Northeast Wisconsin.

Simply raising this topic is almost certain to be denounced as “Islamophobia,” but disease vectors don’t care about theology.  In the past week, there were two health scares at major US airports with passengers quarantined on airliners that landed from overseas with very sick passengers on board. On Wednesday, an Emirates Airline 380 super jumbo jet from Dubai was quarantined at JFK Airport, with 100 passengers initially reported as ill. Eventually, nineteen passengers were confirmed as ill, and ten passengers were hospitalized with respiratory illnesses. The following day, two American Airlines flights from Europe were quarantined upon landing at...

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — The father of Imran Awan — an IT aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who investigators concluded made “unauthorized access” to House servers — transferred a USB drive to a Pakistani senator and former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency, the father’s ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas, alleged. Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan’s father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to “change the U.S. president.” Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when...

The presence of Chinese, Russian and Eastern European pilgrims increased significantly. The "controlled" reaction of the Palestinians against Trump's decision on capital Jerusalem. Pilgrimages "good for the whole population": They help fight terrorism and fundamentalism.Jerusalem (AsiaNews) - 2018 began with an "extraordinary boom" in pilgrimages. The Christian Information Center recently announced this, confirming the statistics of the Israeli ministry for tourism: the tensions over Jerusalem have not affected the steadily increasing number of pilgrims arriving in the Holy Land. In the month that has just ended, 770 groups of pilgrims went to the Holy Land, for a total of 26...

Denise Thiem disappeared on the camino de Santiago on April 5th 2015. Photo issued by Thiem Family A farmer from northern Spain has been found guilty of the brutal murder of American Denise Thiem, who went missing as she walked the pilgrimage route to Santiago. Miguel Angel Muñoz Blas, 41, was convicted by a court in León on Wednesday of the murder of a 40-year-old woman whose body was discovered on his land five months after she disappeared while walking the Camino de Santiago. Denise Pikka Thiem, from Arizona, was last seen on April 5th 2015 in a rural area...

“Issac the traveler” as he is known on social media has so far walked almost 6,000 km and has now reached Kuwait. But the Spanish traveler of Algerian descent has about 1,356 km to go to reach the holy city of Makkah to perform Umrah. Umrah is a non-mandatory lesser pilgrimage made by Muslims to Makkah, which may be performed at any time of the year. From Paris - Issac’s starting point - the traveler took five months to reach Kuwait, passing through 16 countries. The only device he has with him to help him reach the goal is simply...

A new $5 million Anglican Centre is to be built in Spain in Santiago de Compostela, the end of the world-famous Catholic pilgrimage route the Way of St James. The Reformed Episcopal Church of Spain, which is part of the Anglican Community under the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is to begin fundraising with the help of Trinity Church, Wall Street in the United States. The new Anglican centre in Spain will have instant and enormous appeal to Christians from through the Anglican Communion worldwide. Santiago de Compostela is believed to be the burial site of the disciple James,...

While some people are spending as much as $600 a night at hotels for Pope Francis’ highly anticipated visit to Philadelphia, a North Jersey church group is spending less money on a far less luxurious place to stay: the Philadelphia Zoo.

The White House has still refused to name the “American Muslim leaders” with whom President Obama met to “discuss a range of domestic and foreign policy issues.” According to a White House statement on the President’s meeting, the domestic issues discussed were the “Affordable Care Act, anti-Muslim violence and discrimination, the 21st Century Policing Task Force, and the upcoming White House Summit on Countering Violence Extremism.” On the foreign policy front, “the President discussed the need to continue countering ISIL and other groups that commit horrific acts of violence, purportedly in the name of Islam,” while also congratulating Muslims on...

In Islam, making a ritual pilgrimage to Mecca is almost as sacred as beheading a screaming infidel. These pilgrimages often come with their own death tolls as Muslims throw rocks at a pillar representing satan and generally trample each other and have a good time.In the past, African Muslims would be tricked into making the pilgrimage only to be left with nothing and then sold as slaves. Today there’s a different sort of threat for them on the horizon. Anxious to safeguard Islam’s haj pilgrimage from the threat of Ebola, Saudi authorities are screening pilgrims arriving from West Africa...

Virus Hangs Over Islamic Pilgrimage To Mecca Health officials in the U.S. will be on the alert for anyone returning from the Middle East with symptoms of MERS, a mysterious and potentially deadly illness. Laila Shifa, left, helps her daughter, Homaira Hamid, center, and husband Jahan pack in their Northridge apartment for their hajj pilgrimage. The couple are bringing face masks to help guard against the MERS virus, which has been detected in the Middle East. By Eryn Brown October 9 After they got married last year, Homaira and Jahan Hamid decided they would embark on the hajj pilgrimage to...

Howls of rage went up after the Joint Terrorism Task Force, guns drawn, arrested Maher Hawash in the parking lot of an Intel Corporation facility in March, 2003, and placed him in solitary confinement. The protests intensified as prosecutors detained him without charges for more than a month in an Oregon jail while they pored over the evidence. Given Maher Mofeid "Mike" Hawash's biography, this all came as a particular shock, for he personified the American success story. A Palestinian born in Nablus in 1964 and reared in Kuwait, he arrived in the United States in 1984, earning degrees in...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- "I've stopped using the word coincidence" to describe how the upcoming film "The Way" got made, said its writer-director-producer, Emilio Estevez. "It was providence. ... It was the divine." "The Way," which stars Estevez's father, Martin Sheen, tells the story of four Westerners walking the 500-mile pilgrimage route from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Sheen, who joked during a Feb. 18 interview with Catholic News Service that "I did my own walking" in the movie without a stunt double's help, recalled the first time he tried to make the pilgrimage himself. "It was in...

Eric Holder sues school for Muslim who was refused Muslim pilgrimage leave. Attorney General Eric Holder, who refused to prosecute Black Panthers for voter intimidation and was actually connected to a company that was tied to a terrorist group, is using the might of the federal government to sue the Berkeley school district in the state of Illinois. The Chicago-area school district is a party in a lawsuit filed in Chicago federal court just this past Monday, and it’s all on behalf of a Muslim woman by the name of Safoorah Khan. It seems that Khan thought that McArthur Middle...