Vietnam’s Prime Minister, in this exclusive interview, speaks of his meeting with Pope Francis on October 18, and his country’s relations with the Holy See in recent years and in the future

Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said his meeting with Pope Francis in the Vatican on Saturday, October 18, “will present an opportunity for both sides to enhance mutual understanding, thus strengthening the relationship between Viet Nam and the Holy See.”

“If a same-sex couple has been in a relationship for thirty years, I can’t call that nothing.” Pontier, the President of the French Bishops’ Conference said: I’ll be surprised if we don’t reach a consensus on the Synod’s final document.

An analysis of the “relatio post disceptationem”, Cardinal Erdő’s summary of what was discussed in the first week of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family. The focus was on families facing difficult situations and the Church’s willingness to recognize the positive elements of “imperfect forms” of common-law marriages and cohabitation

The “Arab spring” that hit the Middle East in the last few years with the gross disturbance accompanied with it has affected the dwindling Christian Arab Communities in the region and rocked them to their roots.

Sister Maria of Nazareth has committed herself to an extraordinary mission. The Argentine nun from the Institute of the Incarnate Word has been living in Aleppo, Syria, for the past two months.

She has been ministering to a traumatized Christian community in the former million-strong metropolis in the north of the country, which has suffered some of the worst violence of the three year-old civil war.

Previously based in the Gaza Strip, Sister Maria has seen her share of violence.

The entire affair surrounding the disappearance of Fr. Hanna Jallouf and his parishioners is a snapshot of the kind of life Christians are living in Syria, caught as they are in the midst of a propaganda battle

It is the most precious gift given to a person
to keep the wheel running……
It is rooted in person’s beliefs…….
It grows despite of being stepped on…....
It shines in darkness of reality…………
****
Hope looks like a wild flower…
It remains strong even in desert..
with shortage of water..

A Franciscan parish priest in northern Syria is in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra militia and there has been no news of him since the kidnapping. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land reported the news.

A language that facilitates “dialogue with the world”, “graduality” as an attitude which takes into consideration the difficulties that can separate real families from the Christian ideal, the “long, personalised and also severe” path of preparation for the marriage sacrament, embracing remarried divorcees (“the Eucharist is not the sacrament of the perfect, but rather of those who are on the way”). These are some of the topics that emerged in the Extraordinary Synod on the family which kicked off yesterday in the Vatican. Pope Francis is present at all the meetings.

With extremists flying the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) less than an hour down the road, the future of one of the last Christian communities in the Middle East is at grave risk of assimilation or annihilation.