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Photo: Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I embrace.
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CWN - The head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations expressed hope that President Donald Trump would change American foreign policy in the Middle East, which he linked to the persecution of the region’s Christians.
“If Trump now says that America should defend its borders, not other [countries’ borders], it’s a totally conscious and well thought-out message,” Metropolitan Hilarion said in a television interview.
“If America stops introducing its policies in the Middle East like a bull in a china shop, then I hope that the genocide of Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities, which has continued in the Middle East for over ten years, will end,” he added, according to the Interfax news agency.
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CWN - Amid escalating violence in eastern Ukraine, the nation’s Latin-rite bishops pleaded for prayers for peace.
“Ukraine needs peace,” they said on February 1. “We know that true peace can be only granted by the heavenly Father, but without our participation in prayer and spiritual support, no initiative will reach the goal.”
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CWN - An Iraqi archbishop has welcomed the new US policy—set in an executive order by President Trump—that gives preference to religious minorities in applications for refugee status.
Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil said that the policy would preferential treatment would be a boon to suffering Christians in the Middle East. He made a point of saying that this would be true only if the policy offered support fo all religious minorities, not only Christians. Earlier this week another Iraqi prelate, Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako, had said that a preference for Christians could ultimately harm Iraqi Christians, by increasing resentments among their Muslim neighbors.
Archbishop Warda said that Iraqi Christians “celebrated when Trump won,” hoping that the new American leader would change policies that had ignored the suffering of Christians.
Ironically, the archbishop was denied permission to visit the US, for a scheduled discussion of religious persecution, because of another policy set by the controversial Trump executive order. (See today’s separate CWN headline story.). Ketika permainan togel terus bergulir tanpa mengenal ketinggalan jaman, para bettor togel online terus dan kian semangat mencari untungan dari taruhan ini. Sehingga sulit dihentikan permainan togel online yang hadir melalui website online yang disediakan oleh para agen di indonesia. Mudah melaukan proses bertransaksi dengan para agen togel online di indonesia.
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CWN - The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church met recently with families of the “heavenly hundred”—those slain during the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests that led to the removal of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.
As Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk comforted the families, he spoke of the “information war” that surrounds the conflict that rages there today. “Every time we break through the information blockade, we become the voice of the whole society,” he said.
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CWN - An Iraqi archbishop invited to visit New York and Washington by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is unable to make his visit because of a recent executive order by President Donald Trump temporarily barring entry into the US by citizens of Iraq and six other nations.
Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil had been scheduled to discuss the persecution of Christians with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), and others, according to the New York archdiocesan newspaper.
Msgr. John Kozar, president of CNEWA, said:
I’m planning a visit to Iraq in March to continue to demonstrate the solidarity we have and to show them we haven’t abandoned them and assure them that they are not forgotten. But I don’t know—will I be permitted to enter that country? As we have stopped the flow from these listed nations, some of them are doing the same in kind.
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CWN - The head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with the Holy See, said that he opposed US President Donald Trump’s decision to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”
“Every reception policy that discriminates the persecuted and suffering on religious grounds,” Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako told the Fides news agency, “ultimately harms the Christians of the East, because among other things provides arguments to all propaganda and prejudice that attack native Christian communities of the Middle East as ‘foreign bodies,’ groups supported and defended by Western powers.”
It is not clear whether the Chaldean Patriarch understood that Trump’s executive order does not give preference specifically to Christians (as many media reports have suggested), but to any people suffering persecution for religious reasons.
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