A young Iraqi seminarian who risked his life to save the Blessed Sacrament from being desecrated by ISIS during an invasion has returned to the same church as a priest. Martin Baani was 24 when these events unfolded. Rather than leave Iraq with his family, Baani chose to stay and complete his training in Erbil, Read more
An ISIS-inspired plot for 15 year-old Santos Colon to kill Pope Francis was quietly stopped by the FBI. Colon planned to kill Francis at his final papal Mass at Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It would have been the last day of Francis’s 2015 visit to the US. Had he been successful, the hundreds of thousands Read more
Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” How true! This has been going on since the beginning of time and is showing few signs of disappearing any time soon. We still do violence and evil and justify them in God’s name. Read more
The anniversary of ISIS crimes being recognised as genocide was marked in the US with a gathering of the Genocide Coalition: lawmakers advocates and survivors. On 17 March last year, former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, said ISIS (IS, Islamic State, Daesh) “is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Read more
Freedom from ISIS control was celebrated on Sunday in Qaraqosh with the first mass in two years. Before ISIS took over the area, Qaraqosh was home to the Northern Iraq region’s largest Christian population. The mass was announced with pealing church bells and celebrated in the Church of the Immaculate Conception’s bombed-out shell. The handful Read more
A Syrian priest who was kidnapped by ISIS and escaped five months later says we should boycott Saudi Arabia. The priest, Father Jacques Mourad, had been the prior of a pilgrimage centre. It was destroyed when ISIS captured the nearby city of Al Quaryatayn last August. The city was liberated in April this year. In Read more
Jacques Hamel, the French priest brutally slain by two ISIS sympathizers as he was celebrating Mass in late July, is a martyr, Pope Francis says. This suggests sainthood for the murdered priest may not be far off. The pontiff also said that killing in the name of God is “satanic.” On Wednesday morning, Francis celebrated Read more
The suicide bomb attack on a priest carried out by Ivan Armadi, a 17-year -old Indonesian was inspired by the murder of a French priest in July. “He was imitating … the priest attack because of the internet,” General Tito Karnavian Jakata’s national police chief told foreign journalists. However Armadi’s bomb-making skills, acquired over the Read more
French prosecutors filed preliminary charges of terrorism against a third man detained on suspicion of collaborating in last month’s murder of Fr Jaques Hamel, a French priest, suggesting the slaying was the work of a broader group of Islamic State followers. The 21-year-old was detained Monday in the area of Toulouse, a city 500 miles Read more
Quetta hospital attack was a “senseless and brutal act of violence”. Pope Francis has sent his condolences after the attack on the hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, which killed over 70 people on Monday. The majority of the victims were lawyers who had gathered to mourn the assassination of the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, Read more