Pope Francis offered prayers Sunday for the family of a teenager who went missing 40 years ago this week, an intervention her brother hailed as a sign the Vatican was finally engaging seriously with its most famous cold case. Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, was last seen leaving a music class Read more
As has been his practice since becoming pope in 2013, Pope Francis will take most of the month of July off as a sort of “staycation.” “From July 1 and until the end of the month, as usual,” the pope’s “general, particular and special audiences are suspended. The audiences will resume in August, with the Read more
The owners of a pair of taco restaurants in Northern California were ordered to pay $140,000 (NZD227,000) in back pay and damages to 35 employees for bringing in a purported priest to extract confessions of workplace misconduct. Eduardo Hernandez, Hector Galindo and Alejandro Rodriguez also failed to pay overtime for time worked past a 40-hour Read more
One New Zealand has today become the first telecommunications provider in New Zealand to sign up to Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs’ 11 Voluntary principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. From today, it has also begun blocking Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse material (CSAM) at a network level to prevent Read more
As Pope Francis met with dozens of international artists at the Sistine Chapel on Friday, he sought both to reaffirm the Roman Catholic Church’s commitment to artistic endeavours and to enlist the artists to act as catalysts for change in areas like social justice. Yet as the group sat amid Renaissance frescoes by the likes Read more
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that a polyamorous relationship could be broken into twosomes and considered by the Family Court in a property relationship dispute. The decision relates to a property dispute between a man, Brett, and two women, Lilach and Fiona, who lived at a Kumeu property valued at over $2 million for Read more
A Thai bishop has appealed to his flock to welcome and help refugees who arrived over a week ago from civil war-torn areas of Myanmar. More than 4,000 refugees, most of them Catholics, have entered the Thailand border areas and are “knocking at our front doors, seeking refuge,” said Bishop Francis Xavier Vira Arporndratana of Read more
Broken Rites, a support group for divorced and separated clergy spouses and partners, marked the 40th anniversary of its founding on 10 June. Despite significant social changes over four decades, its work shows no signs of being made redundant. The trigger for its establishment in 1983 had been a letter to the church press from Read more
The UK Government has been given a climate wake-up call by CAFOD after a slew of prayers from CAFOD supporters was dispatched to 10 Downing Street. The ‘Prayers for Tomorrow’, written by Catholics across England and Wales, were delivered to 10 Downing Street to call for action to tackle the climate crisis. The prayers are Read more
More than a year after the Government launched a top-level advisory group on Long Covid, leading experts worry sufferers are still being let down by the health system. Those concerns have been aired in a series of just-released video interviews, as the Ministry of Health says it’s impossible to quantify how many people are living Read more