News/International

{mosimage}Six months after Cyclone Nargis killed approximately 100,000 people in Myanmar, Catholic aid and religious organizations are still struggling with how to help people in a corrupt police state.

“Working in a police state? Well, it certainly means certain restrictions are in place,” wrote Jocelyne Dubois, Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace program officer for Asia in an e-mail from Myanmar.

{mosimage}JERUSALEM - Jerusalem's Latin patriarch criticized the creation of a religious state of any kind in the Holy Land, saying that a Jewish or Islamic state would not be suitable for Christians.

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - Anything that threatens the traditional family threatens peace, because the family “is the first and indispensable teacher of peace,” Pope Benedict XVI said.

{mosimage}WASHINGTON - When Arizona Rep. Morris Udall sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, the fact that he was a Mormon, albeit an inactive one, was barely mentioned.

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - In an encyclical on Christian hope, Pope Benedict XVI said that, without faith in God, humanity lies at the mercy of ideologies that can lead to “the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice.”

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - In a liturgy that emphasized the church’s cultural diversity and its unity of mission, Pope Benedict XVI created 23 new cardinals from 14 countries.

{mosimage}BURLINGTON, Ont. - The word “schism” is increasingly being used to describe the state of affairs among Canadian Anglicans in the midst of intensifying disagreements over liberalized theology and a growing acceptance of the blessing of same-sex unions.

{mosimage}LONDON - A British cardinal has criticized proposals to allow lesbians to become joint legal parents of children created for them through in vitro fertilization.

{mosimage}BALTIMORE - Some U.S. policymakers “seem to fail to recognize sufficiently the reality and failures in Iraq and the imperative for new directions,” warned the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a new statement on transition in Iraq.

{mosimage} BALTIMORE - Pope Benedict XVI will visit Washington and New York next April 15-20.