SÃO PAULO, Brazil (RNS) — As Argentina’s national team advanced in the World Cup, spiritual beliefs have become increasing visible among many soccer fans in the South American nation. Now that the team is just one match away from the championship — it will face Spain in the final on Sunday (July 19) — faith…
(RNS) — A Hindu group that wants to build a temple and residential project is suing a Chicago suburb to overturn a nearly 60-year-old legal agreement that blocks their plans. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday (July 14) by Umiya Mataji Sanstha Chicago Midwest, a Hindu religious community, said that a 1967 consent decree meant to…
France’s bishops are strongly criticizing a “radical choice” made by French lawmakers to legalize “assisted dying.” A watershed vote by the National Assembly July 15 legalized assisted dying, including euthanasia and assisted suicide in certain cases. Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of Marseille and president of the bishops’ conference, lamented that “members of parliament have enshrined in…
RIVERSIDE COUNTY, Calif. (RNS) — When Abdul Wahab talks about the proposed Crescent Gardens Cemetery, a dedicated Muslim burial site, he often returns to a simple reality. “People are going to leave this world anyway,” he said. “We don’t have a choice. We need the graves.” Wahab is a board member of the Muslim Mortuary…
The Diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is demanding a jury trial as it fends off the Trump administration’s move to seize a long-revered pilgrimage site for a border wall as part of Trump’s hardline crackdown on immigration. The request comes days after a June 28 pilgrimage with Bishop Peter Baldacchino leading more than 500 faithful from the…
(RNS) — A controversial Tennessee pastor has claimed federal officials broke down his door and raided his house after former members of his church accused him of financial impropriety. The Rev. Greg Locke, pastor of Global Vision Bible Church in Lebanon, Tennessee, said he was lying in bed about three weeks ago and heard a…
A Chicago priest known for his longtime social justice ministry has been placed on leave, following an abuse allegation for an incident said to have taken place some three decades ago. In a July 11 letter, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago informed the archdiocese’s Faith Community of St. Sabina that senior pastor Fr. Michael Pfleger had been…
It is a rare thing—rare almost to the point of unheard-of—for the Holy See’s own news service to issue a public correction aimed, however obliquely, at the ambassador of a friendly power. Yet that is what happened on Monday, when Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication, published a reflection under the deceptively gentle…
As African bishops continue to back Pope Leo XIV over the excommunication of the Society of St. Pius X, known as SSPX, the traditionalist group in Kenya rejected the schismatic tag as it moved to assure followers of its Roman Catholic identity. Fr. Pierre Champroux, the priest in charge of the SSPX’s Holy Cross Parish in Nairobi, claimed in…
Donald Trump’s handpicked representative to the Vatican insists that when Pope Leo XIV said the United States-led war in Iran did not meet the criteria of a just war, he was not speaking as the moral leader of the world’s largest religious denomination. The Vatican, it seems, disagrees. After Brian Burch, U.S. ambassador to the…
