Austen Ivereigh

BARCELONA The Pope has landed at a foggy Lavacolla airport near Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain touching down punctually at 11 30 where he has been greeted by the heir apparent Prince Felipe of Asturias and Princess Letizia together with the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela J

MADRID The weather — this happened before when the Pope came to the UK — is positively Spring-like here in the Spanish capital clear-skied and sunny But Pope Benedict won t be coming here he arrives tomorrow for a 32-hour visit to two iconic European cathedrals the imposing medieval cathed

At the funeral in Baghdad yesterday for the dozens of Christian hostages killed by Al-Qaeda gunmen on Sunday the Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly head of Iraq s largest Catholic church said the victims had been struck by the devil s hand Six young foreign-born Islamic militants burst into

Within a fortnight of the end of the Middle-East Synod there is news out of Baghdad which illustrates what the Iraqi bishops were saying in Rome that Christians and their churches are easy targets for the foreign terror gangs in Iraq Zenit reports that Syrian Catholic Archbishop Georges Casmoussa

Here s a good Halloween topic witches and witchcraft An historian at Edinburgh University scotches some myths at the Guardian comment pages nbsp Most witches were executed in the 16th and 17th centuries There were about 50 000 of them A quarter of them were men Julian Goodare warns us against

The Yukpa people of Venezuela call him Brother Ajishama meaning the one who knows the way to the Promised Land The 81-year-old Spanish Jesuit has spent 45 of his 81 years serving them now he is ready to give his life for them There is no greater demonstration of friendship Fr Jose Maria Kort

The architect who designed the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona Antoni Gaudi could be beatified on 10 June 2016 on the 90th anniversary of his death say the promoters of his Cause The news comes on the eve of the consecration of the Sagrada Familia as a Basilica on 7 November by Pope Benedict XVI

Tariq Aziz Sadaam Hussein s foreign minister and a Catholic has been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity Is he guilty He says his was a political position and that he had no hand in murder and genocide The court disagreed He was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison for inv

Reporting in Rome on it for a week and having read almost every word to have come out of it in the course of its 14 days I simply cannot recognize the description of the Mid-East Synod ending last weekend which was made on Sunday by the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon complained that

Among the 44 proposals or propositions handed to Pope Benedict at the conclusion of the two-week Mid-East Synod are the following which I ve selected because they are interesting important surprising or concrete Call for attention The attention of the whole world should be focused on the