Catholic News

IMAGE: CNS photo/Mohamed Azakir, Reuters

By Dale Gavlak

AMMAN, Jordan (CNS) -- Hospitals in the Lebanese capital are overwhelmed with those suffering injuries from a massive explosion in Beirut's port, causing widespread damage the city and rocking the tiny Mediterranean nation already devastated by the coronavirus and its worst financial crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.

"People won't be able to rebuild their homes, businesses, livelihoods. There are reports of hospitals turning away patients because they don't have the capacity," [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Tristan John "Teejay" Cabrera, courtesy Unbound.org

By Bronwen Dachs

In communities around the world, the social isolation that keeps elders safe from the coronavirus but precludes going to church is proving extremely difficult for many. In some remote areas, younger generations are helping their elders.

In the Philippines, near Quezon City, 55-year-old Melinda Garcia used to help her 100-year-old mother, Julita Santiago, who is blind in her left eye and uses a wheelchair, get to their nearby chapel every [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Remo Casilli, Reuters

By Carol Glatz

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Vatican employees and workers who have contact with the public are being tested for the antibodies for COVID-19, said the new director of the Vatican department of health and hygiene.

"For now, the study has had good results in that no one has been shown to be a carrier of the antibodies," Andrea Arcangeli told the Vatican newspaper in an interview published Aug. 3.

People being tested included Vatican [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn

By Dennis Sadowski

CLEVELAND (CNS) -- The path to true peace requires the world to abolish nuclear weapons, an American bishop and a Japanese archbishop said as the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings at the end of World War II approached.

Speaking during a 30-minute webinar Aug. 3, Bishop David J. Malloy of Rockford, Illinois, and Archbishop Joseph Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki, Japan, reiterated long-standing calls by the bishops' conferences of both countries that the [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/courtesy Thomas Nelson

By Mark Pattison

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Jon Erwin, in tandem with older brother Andrew, has directed movies with Christian themes over the past decade, including "October Baby" "I Can Only Imagine" and "I Still Believe."

But between movies, Erwin collaborated with William Doyle to write the book of his grandfather's service in World War II: "Beyond Valor: A World War II Story of Extraordinary Heroism, Sacrificial Love and a Race Against Time," which will be [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/courtesy Thomas Nelson

By Mark Pattison

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Jon Erwin, in tandem with older brother Andrew, has directed movies with Christian themes over the past decade, including "October Baby" "I Can Only Imagine" and "I Still Believe."

But between movies, Erwin collaborated with William Doyle to write the book of his grandfather's service in World War II: "Beyond Valor: A World War II Story of Extraordinary Heroism, Sacrificial Love and a Race Against Time," which will be [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Paul McErlane, Reuters

By Michael Kelly

DUBLIN (CNS) -- Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, Northern Ireland, has hailed political leader John Hume as a "paragon of peace" for his key role in bringing an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Hume, 83, died early Aug. 3, his family said in a statement.

As a young man Hume trained for the priesthood, before becoming a community activist and later a politician highlighting the plight of the Catholic community in Northern [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Sven Hoppe, pool via Reuters

By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- An author with a long and close relationship to retired Pope Benedict XVI told a German newspaper that the 93-year-old retired pope is "extremely frail."

Peter Seewald, the author who has published four wide-ranging book-length interviews with the retired pope, was quoted in the Aug. 3 edition of the Bavarian newspaper Passauer Neue Presse.

Seewald said he visited with Pope Benedict Aug. 1 to present him with [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Tom Brenner, Reuters

By Betty Araya

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Steven Millies, a scholar who explores the Catholic Church's relationship to politics, feels more optimistic today than he has in a long time about young people in this country voting in a national election.

The reason for his optimism? The young people who continue to protest the May 25 death of George Floyd, an African American, at the hands of white police officers, and demand racial justice. Millies predicts this [...]

IMAGE: CNS photo/Shannon VanRaes, Reuters

By Sarah Mac Donald

DUBLIN (CNS) -- The coronavirus pandemic "opened our eyes to the peripheries in our midst," specifically to the contribution of migrant workers in essential services such as health care, transportation, sanitation and agriculture, said Cardinal Michael Czerny.

The undersecretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development noted that, "paradoxically we had to be as shocked and stuck" during lockdown before "our eyes began to open."

On [...]