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Photo: Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I embrace.
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CWN - Italian police arrested 15 Muslim immigrants on April 16 after a brutal incident in which at least a dozen Christians were thrown overboard from a boat leaving carrying refugees from Libya to Italy.
Witnesses reported that gangs of refugees turned against passengers from other nations, throwing some from the vessel and prompting others to escape onto flimsy life rafts. As many as 40 people may have drowned before Italian authorities intervened to rescue the survivors.
The suspects were charged with multiple homicides, carried out “for reasons of religious hatred.”
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CWN - Armenian Apostolic Patriarch Aram Ateshian of Constantinople will celebrate the Divine Liturgy to mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, risking the wrath of the Turkish government, which has persistently denied the massacres of 1915.
The Armenian prelate will avoid use of the term "genocide," and will offer prayers for anyone who from the bloodshed that accompanied World War I, the Fides news service notes. But the focus will be on victims of the Turkish campaign against the Armenian minority.
In Yerevan, Armenia, the leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Karekin II, will preside at the canonization of genocide victims on April 23. Bells will ring at Armenian churches throughout the world-- except those in Turkey-- in commemoration of the massacre.
Pope Tawadros II, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, will travel to Yerevan to join in the commemoration of the genocide victims.
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CWN - The Russian government has returned Smolny Convent and Cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church, according to a report from AsiaNews.
The convent, whose centerpiece is the cathedral, is located in St. Petersburg and was built for the daughter of Peter the Great as she entered religious life. Construction of the cathedral was completed in 1764.
In 1922, the Communist government of the Soviet Union confiscated the church and turned it into a warehouse. In recent decades, it has been used as a concert hall, and worship at the site resumed in 2010.
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CWN - Turkey’s top political leaders have issued angry statements denouncing Pope Francis for his statement recognizing the Armenian genocide.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the Pope’s statement and warned him “not to repeat this mistake.” He called for the creation of a committee of historians to study the events of 1915, but said reports of a genocide were caused by “delerium.”
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, too, decried the Pope’s statement. He said that the Pontiff had joined an “evil front” forming against Turkey.
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CWN - Bishop Louis Pelâtre, the French-born apostolic vicar of Istanbul, said that Pope Francis’s remarks on the Armenian genocide have caused a “great sensation” in Turkey.
Ilsussidiario.net reported that the prelate said that all Turks heard the remarks “with surprise”: Muslims reacted “with irritation,” while the Christian community reacted “with a bit of embarrassment.”
The situation for Turkey’s Christians, he added, has become “a little more complicated” because of the Pope’s remarks, but he hopes that the situation will improve in a few days.
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Protocol 233/2015 D | Damascus 13/04/2015
In the face of the horrors of the brutal attacks and bloody massacres that have struck our beloved Aleppo, destroying stones and humans, archdioceses, churches and mosques, charitable, educational and private property, and laying waste entire neighbourhoods, we raise this emotional and existential human appeal on behalf of all the victims whose blood has sprinkled the pure earth of Aleppo, and the innocent people, men, women and children slain, many of whose bodies are still under the rubble of buildings!
In the name of humanity, in the name of faith, on behalf of all that is honourable in this world, we raise our voices aloud, calling on the international community to stop the attacks not only on Aleppo, but even on the whole of beloved Syria, and on Iraq, Yemen and the Yarmouk refugee camp, where our abandoned Palestinian brothers are!