Catholic News 2
ISTANBUL (AP) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a series of televised appearances overnight in which he disclosed dramatic details of his survival on the night of a failed coup and raised the specter of reintroducing the death penalty to punish conspirators....
BERLIN (AP) -- A note found in the Afghan train attacker's room where he also kept a hand-painted flag of the Islamic State group indicates he may have been self-radicalized, a top German top security official said Tuesday....
Minya, Egypt, Jul 19, 2016 / 12:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For Christians in Egypt, the possibility of martyrdom is not a remote one.“It is something they concretely feel, it is part of their Christian life,” Father Paolo Asolan, an Italian priest who recently visited Egypt, told CNA. “And for a mother and a father, the fact that one of their sons can become a martyr is always a great gift.”The Islamic State’s beheading of 20 Coptic Christians and another man shocked the world in February 2015 when video of the murders on a Mediterranean beach became public. The other man was a non-Christian who reportedly professed belief in the Christian God before his death. During a recent trip to Egypt, Fr. Asolan met the family of one of the Coptic Christians. He visited the village of al-Our in the north-central Egyptian province of Minya. From this province came 13 of the 21 people beheaded. Al-Our is a small farming community of some 6,000 Muslims and Ch...
Minya, Egypt, Jul 19, 2016 / 12:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For Christians in Egypt, the possibility of martyrdom is not a remote one.
“It is something they concretely feel, it is part of their Christian life,” Father Paolo Asolan, an Italian priest who recently visited Egypt, told CNA. “And for a mother and a father, the fact that one of their sons can become a martyr is always a great gift.”
The Islamic State’s beheading of 20 Coptic Christians and another man shocked the world in February 2015 when video of the murders on a Mediterranean beach became public. The other man was a non-Christian who reportedly professed belief in the Christian God before his death.
During a recent trip to Egypt, Fr. Asolan met the family of one of the Coptic Christians. He visited the village of al-Our in the north-central Egyptian province of Minya. From this province came 13 of the 21 people beheaded.
Al-Our is a small farming community of some 6,000 Muslims and Christians, located about 90 miles from Cairo.
There the priest met the family of Milad Makeen Zaky, who was the first martyr seen praying in the video.
“I was struck by the fact that, before he died, he was praying the name of Jesus,” Fr. Asolan said. “He died speaking the name of Jesus, and that was the very last act of a life that witnessed Jesus in every moment.”
This faithfulness to Christ, Fr. Asolan added, is proved by many details in his life.
“When the Islamic State militants came to seize him, Milad had just finished his daily one-hour meditation over the Sacred Scriptures… at the beginning of the day, he always spent at least one hour reading the Gospel,” the priest recounted.
Fr. Asolan heard from Milad’s mother several anecdotes about his life. She said that it was “as if her son was preparing her for his martyrdom.”
The Coptic Orthodox Church has proclaimed the 21 men to be martyrs. Their beheading shocked Egyptian society.
Fr. Asolan said that “a church for the martyrs” is being built in al-Our. It is completely funded by the Egyptian president, a noteworthy fact because the construction of a new church is highly restricted. It requires specific authorization from the president’s office, which the priest said is “often difficult to obtain.”
Egypt’s Coptic Christians represent between 10 and 20 percent of Egypt’s population of 80 million.
Fr. Asolan is a professor of pastoral theology at the Pontifical Lateran University. He said that the faith of Coptic Christians is based on the twin pillars of monasticism and martyrdom.
“Travelling through Egypt, there are many burials of martyrs. These same Christians used to tattoo a cross on their wrist,” he said.
Fr. Asolan also considered the meaning of martyrdom today.
“Martyrs are witnesses of Jesus, that is, he who said: ‘I am the truth.’ As witness of Jesus, they raise up the issue of truth. Martyrdom is an act of love,” he said. “The fullness of truth is a conversion to love.”
On the other hand, he said, “we live in a time of ‘heresies of life.’ There have always been Christological and Trinitarian heresies… but this is a time of new heresies, not regarding the faith, but love … it is in name of love that truth, that is Christ, is denied.”
From this standpoint, there can be a comparison between what happens in Egypt and what happens in in the Western world.
Fr. Asolan said that just as some Muslims promote the assassination of those who have different beliefs “in the name of love toward God,” in the West there are “people emancipated from religion (who) kill with abortion and euthanasia, claiming that they do it for the love of the human being.”
These “heresies” are sometimes backed “in the name of an unreasonable obedience to a ‘god’ who wants death and not life, as it happened with the 21 Egyptian martyrs.”
Russian Olympic athletes are as much pawns as true players in the drug-infused game in which their government broke rules in a brazen attempt to win medals at any cost....
The U.S. government has issued a report on fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for U.S. cars and trucks that were first established in 2012. The report Monday kicked off a two-year review process leading to a government decision on whether to leave the standards in place through 2025 or change them....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Experts say the development of self-driving cars over the coming decade depends on an unreliable assumption by many automakers: that the humans in them will be ready to step in and take control if the car's systems fail....
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- Has your child swallowed a small battery? In the future, a tiny robot made from pig gut could capture it and expel it....
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkey's state-run news agency says courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in a botched coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned....
BERLIN (AP) -- A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great") during an ax and knife attack on a train in southern Germany that injured at least five people, a German top security official said Tuesday morning....
