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Photo: Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I embrace.
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CWN - Police in Qena, Egypt, have arrested 13 Coptic Christians who had staged a demonstration to protest the failure of police to respond to the kidnapping of a Christian girl.
The father of the kidnapped teenage girl said that she had been missing for three weeks, but police had not even called him to discuss her case. Muslims sometimes kidnap young Christian women and attempt to coerce them into marriage.
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CWN - The Islamic State damaged more than 12,000 Christian homes in the Nineveh Plain region, and completely destroyed nearly 700 of them, Aid to the Church in Need reports.
In a survey of Iraqis who fled from the Nineveh region during the Islamic State’s offensive in the summer of 2014, Aid to the Church in Need found that 40% planned to return to their homes now that they region has been liberated, and another 46% were considering that option. That result shows a jump in confidence; last November, when the fate of the Nineveh region was still uncertain, only 3% said that they planned to return.
However, most of those surveyed reported that the Islamic State had plundered their property, and 22% said that their homes were destroyed. Another 25% did not know whether or not their property was intact.
About 90,000 Christians from the Nineveh Plain are temporarily living in Erbil. (About 120,000 had originally sought shelter there in 2014.) Aid to the Church in Need estimates that the cost of rebuilding their homes will be over $200 million.
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CWN - The head of the Russian Orthodox Church recently praised small town conservatism for helping preserve the nation.
“Were it not for our hinterlands, it is unclear what would have happened to our country in the past decades,” said Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, as he praised the “natural conservatism of the Russian person who is very wary of all sorts of innovation.”
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CWN - Prelates from the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Apostolic churches gathered at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to mark the inauguration of the restored Edicule, the 18th-century shrine that surrounds Christ’s tomb.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople was also in attendance, as was Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
The three churches oversee different parts of the historic church and jointly paid for the Edicule’s restoration. Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, apostolic administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, hailed the event as an ecumenical breakthrough for the area’s Christian communities.
“The Holy Sepulchre, in which all the Christians make the memory of death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the custodian of our faith, but also of our respective histories, our identities,” he said. “It is the mirror of what we are. And while we see in this building our wounds that our historical divisions have created, we want today to celebrate and to show also our desire to cure these wounds.”
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CWN - Jihadist groups and their Syrian rebel allies have conquered 11 towns in Hama province since beginning a surprise offensive on March 21, Agence France-Presse reported.
A regional news website reported that the rebels have advanced to the outskirts of Mahardah, a predominantly Christian city of 20,000.
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By Laura Ieraci • Catholic News Service • Posted March 21, 2017
CHICAGO (CNS) — Two weeks before arriving in Ohio on a nationwide pastoral visit, Bishop Fikremariam Hagos Tsalim of the Eparchy of Segheneity, Eritrea, got word that eight young people from his eparchy died trying to make their way to Europe in search of a better life.
It’s an all-too-common story, Bishop Tsalim told Horizons, newspaper of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, March 7.
About 190 Eritreans died trying to cross into Europe in February alone, he said. The poor migrants usually make their way to Libya, where traffickers demand steep fees to herd them onto a raft that will set sail to southern Italy. Too often the shabby rafts sink in the Mediterranean Sea and the migrants perish.