Category: International News

They sang, they danced and they clapped. As world leaders gathered in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt for the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, faith organisations found their voices through protest.

One in four Catholics in England and Wales changed their eating habits after the Catholic bishops asked them to return to foregoing meat on Fridays, saving more than 55,000 tonnes of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.

Archaeologists in the United Arab Emirates have unearthed the ruins of a Christian monastery on an island off the coast of the Umm al-Quwain emirate. Hidden for more than a millennium beneath a sand dune, the monastery may predate the rise of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula.

India is preparing to celebrate a solemn exposition of the relics of St Francis Xavier, which is expected to draw millions of people of all religions to the archdiocese of Goa. In accordance with a long-standing practice, the exposition of his sacred relics occurs once every 10 years.

Interfaith dialogue is of the utmost priority for world peace, says Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna. 

Pope Francis will mark the 400th anniversary of the death of St Francis de Sales, ‘the gentleman saint’ from Savoy, with a new letter planned for the end of the year. A native of Savoy, where he lived a large part of his life, Francis de Sales was appointed bishop of Geneva but was forced […]

American priest Fr Mike Schmitz says he hopes people ‘will not only grow in information but real transformation’ through listening to a new Catechism in a Year podcast, set to launch on January 1. The Catechism in a Year podcast from Ascension Press follows the Bible in a Year podcast, which has a global audience of more than 1.5 million people. The aim of the daily podcast is to make the Catechism accessible for the common person.

New figures on clerical numbers in Ireland show that a quarter of all priests currently serving in the Irish Church are expected to retire over the next 15 years. The research, carried out by the Association of Catholic Priests, revealed that 547 priests of the 2,100 working priests in the Irish Church currently are aged between 61 and 75 and nearly 300 or 15 per cent of working priests are aged 75 or over. The survey also revealed that across all 26 Irish dioceses, 52 priests or fewer than 2.5 per cent of working priests are younger than 40 and there are just 47 seminarians in Maynooth.

A retired French cardinal has offered to hand himself into the police after he admitted to abusing a 14-year-old girl nearly four decades ago.

Rabbi A. James Rudin, the long-time inter-religious affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, has been made a Papal Knight of St Gregory.