ukraine - search results

Ukrainian Catholic leaders have warned their church is being driven underground again, a quarter-century after it was re-legalized with the end of communist rule. "In Crimea and eastern Ukraine, we've already effectively returned to the catacombs," said Father Ihor Yatsiv, the church's Kiev-based spokesman.

As Ukrainians prepared to mark their Aug. 24 Independence Day under the cloud of fierce fighting in the East, Catholic leaders condemned the threat to Ukraine's territorial integrity and prayed for a speedy end to the hostilities.

A Catholic bishop in eastern Ukraine said church members are afraid to attend Mass in Donetsk and other towns after a priest from Poland was abducted by pro-Russia separatists. The priest traveled to Ukraine to renew his Kazakh visa.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is an extremely dangerous situation that should be of concern to all Americans, said a prominent Ukrainian Catholic priest.

As uncertainty reigned in Ukraine and Russian troops appeared to have control of the Crimean peninsula, Pope Francis again asked the world's Christians to pray for Ukraine and urged the parties involved in the conflict to engage in dialogue.

After a night of violent confrontations between protesters and police and the deaths of more than two dozen people, Pope Francis and Ukrainian church leaders called Feb. 19 for an end to all violence and a serious commitment to dialogue for the good of Ukraine.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Prejudices and preconceptions can block people from finding faith, Pope Francis said, even to the point of making them unable to recognize God standing before them. In the Gospel, the Judeans, who were "scandalized" when Jesus told them he came down from heaven, "are obstructed in their faith by their preconception of his humble origins, and they are obstructed by the presumption therefore that they have nothing to learn from him," the pope said before praying the Angelus in St. Peter's Square Aug. 11.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Jesus calls believers not only to be servants of his kingdom, as the prophets and Mary were, but also to be his friends, Pope Francis said. "Friendship is not the fruit of calculation, nor of compulsion, it is born spontaneously when we recognize something of ourselves in the other," he said May 5. "Jesus, in the Bible, tells us that for him we are precisely this: friends, people beloved beyond all merit and expectation, to whom he extends his hand and offers his love, his grace, his word."

ROME (CNS) -- As Pope Francis poured water over their feet, dried them with a towel and kissed their feet, 12 women inmates at Rome's Rebibbia prison wept. The pope celebrated the evening Mass of the Lord's Supper March 28 at the women's prison under a tent set up outside. The 12 women whose feet were washed by Pope Francis during the liturgy sat on stools on a raised platform so the pope, who has difficulty walking, could wash their feet while seated in his wheelchair.

When we share stories of loved ones or historical figures we usually start with their birthday. We include significant events in their life and if they have died, we include that too. The summary of a human life- birth, life, death. But as Christians, every Easter, we get to glimpse the mysterious and holy experience of a do-over. We get a chance to be reborn into the life that God has imagined for us but that every year we fall short of living. This is both beautifully unique and blessedly communal.