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Italy

Italian mother dies after refusing cancer treatment to save her unborn child

April 18, 2024

At the funeral this week of Italian mother Azzurra Carnelos, who died last week after refusing cancer treatment in order to save the life of her unborn son, she was hailed for her courageous sacrifice and for her love of life. Speaking at Carnelos’s 17 April funeral, Father Massimo Rocchi, director of the Brandolini Rota

Italian Catholics reverting to ancient Roman gods, seers and sorcerers

March 05, 2024

A startling number of lapsed Catholics in Italy are reverting to the deities of ancient Rome and turning to pagan seers, astrologers and psychics, attesting to a potentially catastrophic collapse of Catholicism in its traditional bastion. Over 160,000 sorcerers are doing brisk business in the occult and New Age practises, with over three million Italians

Italian priest nearly drinks from chalice containing bleach in suspected mafia poisoning

February 27, 2024

A Catholic priest in southern Italy was nearly poisoned by bleach mixed with the water and wine used at communion in a suspected mafia-related attempt at intimidation – or worse. Father Felice Palamara, pastor of San Nicola di Pannaconi parish in Cessaniti in the southern Italian region of Calabria, told police that when he prepared to drink

Pilgrimage standoff: Assisi v. Santiago de Compostela, which comes out on top?

February 18, 2024

Can one commit pilgrimage “adultery”? In the months of planning leading up to taking a group of Catholic Herald pilgrims along a portion of La Via di Francesco—the Way of Saint Francis—to Assisi in Italy, I felt a strange sense of unease about how I might be engaged in a form of betrayal. For my peregrino pilgrim

A Valentine’s Day reflection on Terni: the Italian home of Saint Valentine

February 14, 2024

The Catholic Herald knows all about where Saint Valentine comes from. His hometown of Terni, about 60 kilometres north of Rome, is where we started our Via di Francesco Camino pilgrimage to Assisi during October 2023. This Valentine’s Day, though, I am not sure many couples will be romancing there. As Herald editor William Cash notes: “on

Italy and the Catholic Church still riven by pernicious politics of memory

February 13, 2024

ROME – Italy’s February 10 “Day of Remembrance” is worth giving more consideration to than might seem immediately obvious to the non-Italian outsider, given the poignant way it captures the politics of memory. On the one hand, this Memorial Day to a cluster of events from an era of the Second World War and its

European farmers’ protest denied entry to Vatican—along with star cow

February 12, 2024

ROME – As part of continent-wide protests against low food prices and rising costs, a small delegation of farmers on Sunday led a cow that has become a symbol of the uprising toward St. Peter’s Square for the Pope’s traditional noontime Angelus address. They were turned away before being able to enter. Convoys of farmers

Surrogacy: Is there now nothing that the modern world won’t commoditise?

January 10, 2024

This January sales time it appears you can get yourself a half-price baby. Or at least one at a reduced price, excluding delivery charge. This isn’t as flippant as it might sound. The reality we now inhabit is one in which the buying and selling of children increasingly exists in the form of surrogacy. This