Angela “Lita” Boitano was standing about 50 meters away from her daughter Adriana when a car pulled up carrying a group of men who she later learned were Argentinian military policemen dressed as civilians. They grabbed 24-year-old Adriana and bundled her into the car before speeding away. Lita never saw her daughter again. It was Read more
Pope Francis begins a highly anticipated seven-day South American trip on Sunday that includes stops in Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay. This visit has a special meaning to South Americans because Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is a native of Argentina, and is the first Latin American pope in the history of the Catholic Church. This Read more
Latin America is home to more than 425 million Catholics – nearly 40% of the world’s total Catholic population – and the Roman Catholic Church now has a Latin American pope for the first time in its history. Yet identification with Catholicism has declined throughout the region, according to a major new Pew Research Center Read more
Catholic pastoral workers were killed at a rate of one a month last year — 10 priests, one religious sister and one lay person — and the most dangerous part of the world was South America. The Fides news service has published its annual document listing all the Church workers who lost their lives in Read more
A New Zealand priest, Tony O’Connor, is presently doing up a chapel dedicated to Saint Peter Chanel in Paso Real, Venezuela. Saint Peter Chanel might well be the Proto Martyr of Oceania, revered with affection in the Pacific and rightly so. But he also stepped on to the soil of South America when the first Read more