International News

News from outside of Canada.

Pope says forgiveness key to reconciling divided Korea

August 15, 2014

SEOUL, South Korea - Addressing young people from Korea and other Asian countries on their concerns about the future, Pope Francis said the best hope for reunification of the divided Korean peninsula lay in brotherly love and a spirit of forgiveness.

At stadium Mass, pope tells Koreans to resist materialism

August 15, 2014

SEOUL, South Korea - Celebrating Mass before some 50,000 people, Pope Francis prayed that Christian values overcome demoralization in economically successful societies.

Aid agencies try to 'pick up the pieces' in Gaza

August 15, 2014

AMMAN, Jordan - A senior Catholic aid official said humanitarian agencies are "trying to pick up the pieces" of Gaza's badly destroyed infrastructure, desperately hoping that the declared truce between Israel and the militant Hamas will hold.

Western leaders press governments to help Iraqi minorities

August 14, 2014

WASHINGTON - Western leaders pressed their governments to increase humanitarian efforts on behalf of persecuted Christians and other minorities in northern Iraq.

Iraqi minorities need more than material aid, cardinal says

August 14, 2014

VATICAN CITY - The one thing Iraqi Church leaders and aid workers, foreign charities and governments cannot do for the displaced and terrorized people of northeastern Iraq is answer their question, "What will become of us?" said Cardinal Fernando Filoni, the Pope's envoy to the region.

Families of Korean ferry accident appeal to Pope for justice

August 14, 2014

SEOUL, South Korea - Families of the victims of the April Sewol ferry accident appealed directly to Pope Francis for justice on the eve of his Aug. 14-18 Korean visit.

U.S. must ‘destroy’ Islamic State, say religious conservatives

August 13, 2014

A coalition of more than 50 U.S. religious leaders, led by mostly conservative Catholic, evangelical and Jewish activists, is calling on President Barack Obama to sharply escalate military action against Islamic extremists in Iraq. They say “nothing short of the destruction” of the Islamic State can protect Christians and religious minorities now being subjected to “a campaign of genocide.”

Healing after black teen's shooting 'in Jesus' hands'

August 13, 2014

FERGUSON, Mo. - Against the backdrop of demonstrations and unrest, some of it violent, that has followed the Aug. 9 killing of an unarmed black teenager by police in Ferguson, members of a local Catholic parish did perhaps the only thing they could — they prayed.

Liberian health system suffers from strain of Ebola

August 13, 2014

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Liberia's health system is in "complete shambles," a Church aid agency said, as the death of a Spanish priest brought to six the number of caregivers at a Catholic-run hospital in the capital of Monrovia who have died of Ebola in August.

Catholic Iraqi refugees in Lebanon recall horror of militant attacks

August 12, 2014

BEIRUT - The memory of that brutal June evening in his home near Mosul, Iraq, brought 48-year-old Joseph, now a refugee in Lebanon, to tears.