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Egyptian soldiers attacked for the second time the Monastery of Saint Bishoy Alexandria in Wady el-Rayan, Fayoum, 110 km from Cairo. Two monks and six Coptic labourers were wounded. Four people were arrested, three monks and a Coptic lawyer who was visiting the monastery to investigate a similar incident the day before. Monk Aksios Ava Bishoy told Nader Shoukry, of Free Copts, that the army stormed the monastery using five tanks, armoured vehicles and a bulldozer to demolish the fence built by the monastery last month to protect the building and its residents from the lawlessness that has prevailed in...

The 2010 Yearbook from the National Council of Church USA is out and the news continues to be good for Catholics. The Catholic Church, the nation's largest at more than 68 million members, reported a slight membership loss in 2009 (for the year 2007) but rebounded . . . with a robust growth of 1.49 percent in 2008. Other groups that posted significant gains were the Mormon Church (Latter Day Saints) which grew 1.71 percent to 5,873,408 members and the Assemblies of God grew 1.27 percent to 2,863,265 members. The big losers: mainline Protestants continue their slide Presbyterian Church (USA),...

Anchorage, Alaska, Jan 5, 2009 / 05:47 pm (CNA).- Nearly 230 years ago, three Roman Catholic priests sailed from Mexico to Alaska where they would celebrate the first Catholic Mass in the state and bring the Body and Blood of Christ to the Last Frontier. Racing north According to the Catholic Anchor, by the year 1779, the race to explore and claim rights to the far north had already reached Alaska.  During the previous year, the English Captain Cook had sailed into the inlet that now bears his name, and the Russians were already trading furs with Native Alaskans. The...

Sees Byzantine church a “perfect marriage” of Eastern traditions and unity with pope By PATRICIA COLL FREEMANCatholicanchor.orgA former Lutheran pastor from Northern Michigan now heads St. Nicholas of Myra Byzantine Catholic Church in Anchorage.On Oct. 31, Father James Barrand, 52, succeeded just-retired pastor Father Mike Hornick at the little, dome-topped church, where an ancient Catholic liturgy is celebrated everyday. Father Barrand is quick to explain that he got to the icon and incense-filled church with the help of ancient guides — the Early Church Fathers — who chanted the same Divine Praises in the first centuries of the church as...

New Orleans Archbishop Alfred Hughes on Thursday joined a growing chorus of Catholic bishops deploring the University of Notre Dame's decision to award President Barack Obama an honorary degree at graduation exercises next month.Notre Dame is perhaps the flagship Catholic university in the country. But Obama favors abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research, two public policies vigorously opposed by the Roman Catholic Church. His administration recently suspended federal "conscience rules" that, under the Bush administration, had shielded some health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions on the basis of "religious beliefs or moral convictions."Hughes wrote Notre Dame's president,...

FAIRBANKS -- The Fairbanks Catholic Diocese has filed a reorganization plan with the U.S. Federal Bankruptcy Court. The filing Tuesday comes 13 months after the diocese declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The plan calls for the diocese to mortgage or sell church properties and commit to fundraising and donor appeals to establish a fund to be used primarily for paying the claims of victims of sexual abuse. "This is just the first step that we feel we can come up with," said Robert Hannon, diocesan chancellor. "We project we can offer claimants more than $8.6 million." Hannon said the projected insurance...

CNN's Roland Martin is hosting Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull for the next eight weeks. On Monday's program, Martin clearly demonstrated he's going to have trouble living up to the program's title. The subject was the Notre Dame-Barack Obama controversy. Martin argued with the Catholic League's William Donohue that inviting the adamantly pro-abortion Obama to the school and awarding him an honorary degree is no different from Notre Dame's 2001 treatment of former President George W. Bush, who supports capital punishment: And one of the critical issues when it came to Bush speaking in 2001, death penalty. I have...

In the highest-ranking response yet to Notre Dame's choice of President Obama as its commencement speaker, the junior American cardinal -- in a rare public call-out -- "venture[d] a comment" on the dispute with a statement released this afternoon in which he termed the invite "very disappointing." In his bi-weekly "Shepherd's Message" -- most of it dedicated to Pope Benedict's recent letter on the SSPX de-excommunications and the importance of charity in ecclesial disputes -- Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston published the following at the column's close: In light of what I wrote above, I want to venture a...

As was announced recently, the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., is presenting President Barack Obama with an honorary degree and have asked him to give the commencement address. I, along with many other Catholics, express great disappointment and sadness that a Catholic university would honor someone who is pro-choice and who holds many values contrary to our Catholic belief. In the midst of such a sad situation, as Catholics we must continue to be pro-life and to proclaim with even greater strength the values of Christ and the teachings of the Catholic Church. In my opinion, it...

The following is a letter from University of Notre Dame alumnus Father John J. Raphael, S.S.J., addressed to ND president Father John Jenkins: 'Dear Fr. Jenkins, 'My name is Fr. John J. Raphael, SSJ. I am a member of ND's graduating class of 1989. I am currently the principal of St. Augustine High School in New Orleans, LA and a member of Notre Dame's Admissions Advisory Board. 'I am writing to express my extreme disappointment and grave disapproval of the decision to invite President Obama to give the commencement address and to receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame at...

Here is a screen capture of the letter that the Bishop of Phoenix Thomas Olmsted sent to Notre Dame President Father Jenkins yesterday (on the Feast of the Annunciation) and has now permitted to be published today: These are very strong words from Bishop Olmsted, especially these two lines: "It is a public act of disobedience to the Bishops of the United States.""I pray that you come to see the grave mistake of your decision, and the way it undercuts the Church's proclamation of the Gospel of Life in our day." Mike Phelan, Director of Marriage and Respect Life for...

As he progressed from Methodist Youth Fellowship member to active layperson to ordained minister, Scott Medlock seemed destined for lifelong service in the United Methodist Church. But Medlock, an Orlando, Fla., native, has had a dual faith journey. The second journey started during his undergraduate years at the University of Notre Dame, intensified with his marriage to a "cradle Catholic" and eventually led to a desire for a more "eucharistically-centered" faith experience. On March 19, the 41-year-old former United Methodist pastor was ordained a Roman Catholic deacon. On July 26, in Anchorage, Alaska, he will be ordained a priest. Along...

When Steve Olmstead served as a Presbyterian minister in Juneau, he would often finish his duties on Sunday, close up the church and head to Mass with his devout Catholic wife and their children.“I had a place to worship, which a lot of pastors don’t,” Olmstead said in an interview with the Anchor. “It was nice to go to a place and worship where I wasn’t the minister.”The Anchorage Archdiocese’s newest seminarian grew up in a Presbyterian home and always had a strong spiritual life. When Olmstead entered adulthood, he felt called to serve as a youth minister, and was...

Caritas Internationalis emergency response efforts are underway in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady division and Yangon districts, two of the areas hardest hit by Cyclone Nargis, for an estimated 40,000 people who will receive vital relief, including food, shelter, water, medical care and psychological support. Catholic Relief Services is supporting Caritas Internationalis and partners on the ground after one of the worst cyclones to hit the region in decades struck this delta region on May 2. To date, 1,000 people have received food, and another 16,000 people are expected to receive relief supplies in the coming days. More than 100 local volunteers have...

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX: Pastor challenged boss's authority in Daily News interview.National leaders of the Russian Orthodox church were meeting this week in New York, wrestling with chaos in their Alaska diocese as the man in the middle of the turmoil defended his leadership. Among the grumblings about Alaska Bishop Nikolai Soraich is that he fired a popular priest from a teaching post after the priest criticized him in a newspaper story published Friday.Priests and parishioners from around the state petitioned church leaders to remove Bishop Nikolai in a series of letters and e-mails over the past several weeks. They accuse the...

The Mass is celebrated publicly about 176 times each week at Notre Dame when the University is in session, says Father Richard Warner, CSC, the director of campus ministry. Different Masses meet different spiritual needs. Congregants may pray together in English, Spanish or Latin and choose from a sampler box of musical styles and aesthetic surroundings. All of these Masses are celebrated according to the reformed Roman Missal of Pope Paul VI introduced in 1970. All except one, that is. At 8 a.m. on October 14, some 100 people gathered with Father Thomas Blantz, CSC, in the Saint Charles Borromeo...

EthicsDaily.com reported 11 arrests, three convictions, two lawsuits and one suicide involving alleged sexual abuse by clergy in 2007.Other stories included a church that allowed a convicted sex offender to preach from its pulpit while knowing about his past and comments by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention denying clergy predators are a "systemic" problem and accusing victim advocates of using the issue for personal gain. Those stories were part of ongoing coverage of efforts by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests to pressure the 16.3 million-member convention to establish an independent review board for clergy sex...

In the fall of 1985 I was a rather complaisant Evangelical Protestant. If not quite fat, dumb, and happy--well, at least I was happy. Or so I thought. I was confident in my Evangelicalism and took it for granted that I possessed the truth absolutely. I had had a vivid conversion nearly thirteen years before. I studied the Bible diligently, and I belonged to a solid, growing, thoroughly Evangelical church. I had many well-educated Evangelical friends; I had a sense of purpose in pursuing apologetics as my ministry. Then I chanced upon a slim little book by Thomas Howard entitled...

Originally this was going to be a story about my own journey to the Catholic Church, but due to my own procrastination in getting it written, it is now happily the story of my whole immediate family’s journey to the Church. My father was a cradle Catholic and my mother was raised Methodist. At my father’s insistence she became a Catholic. By her own admission, this was strictly an external act for her; inwardly she remained unconverted. My brother, sister, and I were baptized as infants in the Catholic faith, but my father died at the age of thirty-one, which...

CHAPTER TWOTHE TRADITION OF PRAYER ARTICLE 2THE WAY OF PRAYER In the living tradition of prayer, each Church proposes to its faithful, according to its historic, social, and cultural context, a language for prayer: words, melodies, gestures, iconography. The Magisterium of the Church15 has the task of discerning the fidelity of these ways of praying to the tradition of apostolic faith; it is for pastors and catechists to explain their meaning, always in relation to Jesus Christ. Prayer to the Father There is no other way of Christian prayer than Christ. Whether our prayer is communal or personal, vocal or...