Category: Religion
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The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church led the funeral service for a man convicted of genocide. Most Christian traditions hold that funeral rites are prayers, not verdicts. But nothing in that theology required an honour guard, a patriarch and thousands in the street.
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Pope Leo XIV has devoted his September prayer intention to the care of water, opening the five-week Season of Creation with a Mass at Castel Gandolfo. Behind the appeal sits a figure the Vatican cited directly: a quarter of the world’s population without safe drinking water.
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Catholic health providers are suing Illinois over its assisted-dying law. The fight is not over whether a doctor can refuse — it is over what an institution owes a patient after it has refused.
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A report says paid Church of England clergy have fallen to 6,295, a record low, and that resignations now outnumber retirements. The second figure is the one that should worry the institution, and the poorest parishes feel it first.
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Three thousand people performed salat istisqa in Palembang while 52 aircraft conducted cloud-seeding overhead. What the prayer for rain is, why the two are not in competition, and what a public ritual does during a collective emergency.
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At a private audience marking 60 years of Portugal’s Military Ordinariate, the pope praised the soldier’s vocation and urged humility. It sits alongside his criticism of particular wars, including the US campaign against Iran — a tension that is older than this pontificate.
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A Yorkshire church group has apologised after grave ornaments, including a teddy bear left for 23 years, were removed and binned without warning. The churchyard rules behind it, why the objection is about notice rather than the rule, and what grief research says.
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The Pope’s message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees is built around children, and its central demand invokes a legal standard rather than a moral one. Where migrant children actually get lost in the system, and the reasonable objections.
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Pope Leo XIV praised San Marino as a model of political freedom on Saturday, then travelled to Rimini for the Communion and Liberation meeting — the first pope to attend since John Paul II in 1982. Why the second half of the day is the political one.
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A soldier missing in Lebanon since 1982 was buried in Jerusalem on Friday, 44 years on. Why burial is treated as a debt owed to the dead, what the Mount of Olives signifies, and why the same obligation makes remains a bargaining chip.