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Vatican City, Feb 24, 2017 / 11:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Vatican seminar on water held this week highlighted the complex challenges faced around the world in making the basic human right to water a reality for all people.Reliable access to safe and clean water for everyone is an issue close to the heart of the Church, Cardinal Peter Turkson told CNA Feb. 23, because it has to do with the fundamental dignity possessed by every human person.Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Cardinal Turkson wasn’t a formal participant himself, but sat in on a few of the sessions. He said that “on the level of the Church” the point of departure for the issue of water access is “certainly dignity.”“Because we affirm the dignity of people, we also affirm anything that is needed to make this dignity realized,” he said.Hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Argentine organization Catedra del dialogo y la cultura encue...
Washington D.C., Feb 24, 2017 / 12:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Trump administration’s new border and immigration enforcement rules needlessly endanger the vulnerable, militarize the border and will cause many other problems, the U.S. bishops warned this week.“They greatly expand the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Bishop Joe S. Vasquez of Austin, chair of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration, who wrote the bishops’ Feb. 23 response.On Feb. 20, the Department of Homeland Security issued two memoranda to implement President Donald Trump’s executive orders regarding immigration enforcement on the border and in the U.S. interior.“Taken together, these memoranda constitute the establishment of a large-scale enforcement system that targets virtually all undocumented migrants as ‘priorities’ for deportation, thus prioritizing no one,” Bishop Vasquez said.Important protections for the vulnerable, including unacc...
IMAGE: CNS photo/L'Osservatore RomanoBy Cindy WoodenVATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Access to clean drinking water is abasic human right and a key component in protecting human life, Pope Francissaid."The right to water is essential for the survival ofpersons and decisive for the future of humanity," the pope said Feb. 24during a meeting with 90 international experts participating in a"Dialogue on Water" at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.Looking at all the conflicts around the globe, Pope Francissaid, "I ask myself if we are not moving toward a great world war overwater."Access to water is a basic and urgent matter, he said."Basic, because where there is water there is life, making it possible forsocieties to arise and advance. Urgent, because our common home needs to beprotected."Citing "troubling" statistics from the UnitedNations, the pope said, "each day -- each day! -- a thousand children diefrom water-related illnesses and millions of persons consume polluted water."While the situa...
IMAGE: CNS photo/NASA handout via ReutersBy Carol GlatzVATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The quest to find life on other planets got a boost when astronomers confirmed the existence of at least seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a red dwarf star just 40 light years away.Three of the planets are located in the so-called "habitable" zone, a kind of "Goldilocks" sweet spot in that their distance from the sun makes them not too hot, not too cold, but just right for having liquid water -- an essential ingredient for life.The pope's own astronomers applauded the new discovery around the dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1, named after one of the many telescopes that detected the planets. The study's results were published in Nature magazine Feb. 22."The discovery is important because, to date, it has revealed the highest number of Earth-sized planets revolving around a single parent star," U.S. Jesuit Father David Brown told Catholic News Service."Depending on different factors, all of the planets could potentia...
IMAGE: CNS/L'Osservatore RomanoBy Junno Arocho EstevesVATICANCITY (CNS) -- For decades, the visits bishops are required to make to the Vatican were known for their formalityand routine style, but Pope Francis launched "a whole new style of 'adlimina' visits," a Chilean bishop said. The bishopswere expecting "to have a long meeting with a speech and then individualmeetings," as in the past, Auxiliary Bishop Fernando Ramos of Santiago,secretary of the Chilean bishops' conference, told Catholic News Service Feb.24. Instead,the Vatican informed the prelates before their departure from Chile that they were going to have a groupmeeting with the pope and the prefects of several Vatican congregationsand offices. "Wewere told that this was going to be a new way of doing things that wasbeginning with us, that looks for a more fruitful, more incisive dialoguebetween the representatives of the local churches and the pope with his maincollaborators," Bishop Ramos said. After spending three hour...
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- In a major break for Bill Cosby, a judge ruled Friday that just one of the comedian's multitude of other accusers can testify at his trial to bolster charges he drugged and violated a woman more than a decade ago....
MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) -- Lucille Conlin Horn weighed barely 2 pounds when she was born, a perilous size for any infant, especially in 1920. Doctors told her parents to hold off on a funeral for her twin sister who had died at birth, expecting she too would soon be gone....
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) -- Witnesses said a man accused of opening fire in a crowded bar yelled at two Indian men to "get out of my country" before pulling the trigger in an attack that killed one of the men and wounded the other, as well as a third man who tried to help....
News organizations including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico were blocked from joining an informal, on the record White House press briefing on Friday....
MOSUL AIRPORT, Iraq (AP) -- As Iraqi ground troops pushed into western Mosul on Friday, the country's air force struck Islamic State group targets inside Syria for the first time in response to recent bombings in Baghdad claimed by the militants....
