BROD, Kosovo - The Catholic priest followed the village elders up a narrow road that curved between the green hills in the tiny hamlet of Gjonaj in southern Kosovo.

PARIS - The exodus of Christians from the Middle East — due to wars, conflicts, socio-economic crises and persecution — will weaken moderate Islam "which, thanks to the Islamic-Christian conviviality, is so far the vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East," said Lebanese Cardinal Bechara Rai.

The words to describe Islamic State atrocities have been all but exhausted. The bloodcurdling images in the news of their attacks stir the deepest resentment and there appears to be no end in sight to their violent activities. All of society feels insecure and vulnerable.  

OTTAWA - The Canadian Council of Churches in an open letter to Prime Minister Harper has urging a broader response to the crisis in Iraq and Syria than military intervention.

YON, France - Sunlight slants across a classroom at the Catholic University of Lyon, where the Bible dominates an evening lecture.

A northern Nigeria Muslim leader who promised to pursue a nonreligious agenda as president will now have to deal with an Islamic terrorist insurgency that has wreaked chaos in the country’s north.

A country that deems it progressive to kill your grandmother but conservative for the state to dictate your choice of hat might be going, in a technical sense, nuts.

NEW YORK - Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York said Islamic State militants terrorizing the Middle East are a distortion of “genuine” Islam much as the Irish Republican Army was a “perversion” of Catholicism.

SANLIURFA, Turkey - Hassan, a chain-smoking 20-year-old from Syria, sits in a cafe across the border from his homeland, one of thousands who escaped the clutches of the Islamic State group.

OXFORD, England - German Church leaders have criticized an anti-Islamic movement that staged mass demonstrations in Dresden and other cities, but they also urged a better understanding of public fears.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis condemned the killings of at least 12 people at the Paris offices of a satirical weekly newspaper Jan. 7 and denounced all "physical and moral" obstacles to the peaceful co-existence of nations, religions and cultures.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis deplored the "abuses and inhuman acts" of Islamic State militants, and called on all religious leaders to condemn them "unanimously and unambiguously." He also said he hoped to travel to the Middle East to comfort persecuted Christians there.

CANTERBURY, England - As a 17-year-old convert to Christianity living in Pakistan, Ali (not his real name) was stabbed in the chest and left for dead by Muslims upset he had rejected their faith.

VATICAN CITY - Almost every papal trip abroad is a complex mix of the religious and political, and that will be especially true of Pope Francis' Nov. 28-30 visit to Turkey.