FREE access to the digital edition and archives until September 2. Click here. →
Browse › 2015 › June
June 13, 2015
IQUITOS, Peru - As floodwaters rose with heavy rains in this Amazonian city, Graciela Tejada and her neighbours found greasy slaughterhouse offal, human feces and used hypodermic needles floating practically to their doorsteps.
June 14, 2015
Students at Sacred Heart Catholic Elementary School in Niagara Falls, Ont., were buzzing with excitement when they heard Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder and CEO of Mary’s Meals, was coming to visit. The school only had about a week to prepare for his June 2 visit, but it was obvious where to start.
VATICAN CITY - A charity for youth established by Pope Francis has suspended a donations agreement with a South American soccer federation, following the corruption scandal that erupted last month with the worldwide soccer federation, FIFA.
June 15, 2015
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis will meet a gay married activist in Paraguay next month, according to an LGBT rights group in that country.
WARSAW, Poland - Poland's Catholic bishops pledged to resist changes to Catholic teaching on marriage and family life at October's synod on the family at the Vatican and rejected demands for reform by German-speaking Catholics.
VATICAN CITY - A former Vatican nuncio will stand trial in a Vatican court on charges of the sexual abuse of minors and possession of child pornography.
ST. PAUL, Minn. - Pope Francis accepted the resignations June 15 of Archbishop John C. Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee A. Piche of St. Paul and Minneapolis and named coadjutor Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda of Newark, New Jersey, a canon lawyer, to be apostolic administrator of the Minnesota archdiocese.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis stressed the importance of children having heterosexual parents June 14, just a day after Rome’s gay pride march demonstrated the changing attitudes about same-sex couples outside the Vatican walls.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis said planning for a possible visit to Colombia would be accelerated by a peace agreement in the country, said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Calderon, following his meeting with the pontiff at the Vatican June 15.
June 16, 2015
ROME - "Laudato Si'," the title Pope Francis chose for his encyclical on the environment, comes from a hymn of praise by St. Francis of Assisi that emphasizes being in harmony with God, with other creatures and with other human beings, said the head of the Franciscan order.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis has formally approved the Canadian delegates to October's world Synod of Bishops on the family.
A new survey finds U.S. Catholics — like most Americans — are divided along political lines when it comes to the cause and urgency of climate change. And Pope Francis, in a leaked copy of a hotly anticipated encyclical, goes straight at it.
The most anticipated papal encyclical in history has anticipated itself. What an angry Vatican spokesman called an “intermediate draft” of the letter from Pope Francis on the environment was leaked by an Italian magazine three days before its official launch.
June 17, 2015
VATICAN CITY - Appealing to the entire world, Pope Francis urged everyone to read his upcoming encyclical on the care of creation and to better protect a damaged earth.
TORONTO - A sudden decision to close St. Michael’s Cathedral will scatter cathedral parishioners to other downtown parishes on Sundays for the next nine months while structural repairs and renovations continue on the historic church.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis said people who shut out refugees should seek forgiveness June 17, after clashes on Italy’s borders as European countries try to push back against a wave of migrants fleeing by boat from Libya.
Americans have less confidence in organized religion today than ever measured before — a sign that the Church could be “losing its footing as a pillar of moral leadership in the nation’s culture,” a new Gallup survey finds.
June 18, 2015
Everyone longs to know something that’s secret, to know something that others don’t know, but that you know, and the knowledge of which gives you some insight and advantage over others who are outside the inner circle of that secret. It has always been so. Historically this is called “Gnosticism,” which forever makes an appearance in one form or another.
A Facebook friend took it upon himself to post on my home page for all my other friends to see an article entitled: “Religion is disappearing. That’s great for politics.”
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) June 28 (Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-43) Death is the enemy that humans fear most. People tend to blot it from their minds and often refuse to even talk about it. It is easy to bury it under a layer of euphemisms, even as aches, pains and illness become more frequent and unwelcome visitors. But in the end, death comes for us — all of us without exception.