church

Nigeria is in the news again due to recent attacks by armed groups, involving the kidnapping of many students from schools and an assault on a church service. These events have increased pressure on the Nigerian government, especially after U. S. President Donald Trump hinted at possible military action owing to the reported persecution of Christians in the country.

The attacks lack clear responsibility claims, but they resemble those by gangs seeking ransom. These armed groups, referred to as bandits, use intimidation and violence, abducting victims and escaping into forests. Recently, 25 students were taken from a Muslim girls’ school in Kebbi state, marking the first mass school kidnapping since a larger incident in March 2024. Additionally, another 64 individuals were kidnapped from Zamfara state, and two people were killed during an attack on a church in Kwara state, where 38 worshippers were also abducted with a ransom demand made. On Friday, more students were kidnapped from St. Mary’s Catholic school in Niger state, with reports indicating 52 students taken.

Experts believe these attacks are financially motivated, particularly targeting schools due to weak security. Kidnappers find it easier to demand ransoms from parents willing to pay to get their children back. The northwest of Nigeria is especially plagued by insecurity, with armed groups operating in remote areas. Meanwhile, in the northeast, extremist groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP have caused significant humanitarian crises, resulting in over 2 million displaced persons and many deaths.

Tension in Nigeria also arises from ethnic and religious conflicts, especially in the central regions where the Christian and Muslim populations clash over various issues. Despite claims of specific persecution against Christians, some argue that the situation is more complex and that Muslims also suffer violence. The Nigerian government rejects assertions of complicity in religious violence by security forces.

The U. S. is considering actions to pressure Nigeria into better protecting religious freedoms. Nigeria’s military leads the counter-efforts against these armed groups, with traditional leaders also engaging in peace negotiations. However, attacks continue amid reports of increasing violence, with thousands of civilian deaths this year alone. President Tinubu has dispatched officials to oversee rescue efforts for kidnapped schoolgirls.

With information from Reuters

Tunis, Tunisia – Night had just about fallen in Halq al-Wadi, also known as La Goulette, a balmy coastal suburb of Tunis, when the Virgin Mary emerged from the local church, Saint-Augustin and Saint Fidele, into a packed square.

Carried on the shoulders of a dozen churchgoers, the statue of the Virgin was greeted with cheers, ululations and a passionately waved Tunisian flag.

Hundreds of people – Tunisians, Europeans, and sub-Saharan Africans – had gathered for the annual procession of Our Lady of Trapani.

Many of those participating in the procession, and the Catholic Mass that came beforehand, were from sub-Saharan Africa.

“It’s the Holy Virgin who has brought us all here today,” Isaac Lusafu, originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told Al Jazeera. “Today the Virgin Mary has united us all”.

In a large, packed square just beyond the church gates, the statue moved in a circle as people prayed and sang hymns. It was all under the watchful eye of a mural of Claudia Cardinale, the renowned Italian actress born in La Goulette, a reminder of the distant past when the district was home to thousands of Europeans.

A melting pot

The Catholic feast of Our Lady of Trapani was brought to La Goulette in the late 1800s by Sicilian immigrants, in the days when the port town was a hub for poor southern European fishermen in search of a better life.

Immigration to Tunisia from Sicily peaked in the early 20th century. Nearly all of the fishermen, along with their families and descendants, have now returned to European shores, but the statue of the Virgin remained – and, every year on August 15, it is carried in procession out of the church.

“It’s a unique event,” Hatem Bourial, a Tunisian journalist and radio presenter, told Al Jazeera.

He went on to describe how, in the procession’s heyday in the early 20th century, native Tunisians, Muslims and Jews alike, would join Tunisian-Sicilian Catholics in carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary from the church down to the sea.

There, participants would ask Mary to bless the fishermen’s boats. Many residents would shout “Long live the Virgin of Trapani!”, Bourial said, while others threw their chechia, a traditional red cap worn in the Maghreb, in the air.

As well as its religious significance – for Catholics, August 15 marks the day that Mary was taken up into heaven – the feast also coincides with the Italian mid-August holiday of Ferragosto, which traditionally signals the high point of the summer.

Silvia Finzi, born in Tunis in the 1950s to Italian parents, described how, after the statue had been brought down to the sea, many of La Goulette’s residents would declare that the worst of the punishingly hot Tunisian summer was over.

“Once the Virgin had been taken down to the water, it was as if the sea had changed”, Finzi, a professor of Italian at the University of Tunis, told Al Jazeera.

“People would say ‘the sea has changed, the summer’s over’, and you wouldn’t need to go swimming to cool down any more”.

European exodus

The first European immigrants began to arrive in La Goulette in the early 19th century. Their numbers rapidly increased after 1881, when Tunisia became a French protectorate. At its height in the early 1900s, the number of Italian immigrants – who were largely Sicilians – across the whole of Tunisia is estimated to have been more than 100,000.

In the decade after 1956, when Tunisia gained its independence from France, the vast majority of its European residents left the country, as the new government pivoted towards nationalism.

In 1964, the Vatican signed an agreement with Tunisia, transferring control of the majority of the country’s churches – now largely empty – to the government for use as public buildings. The agreement also put an end to all public Christian celebrations, including the procession in La Goulette.

For more than half a century, August 15 was marked only with a Mass inside the church building, and the statue of Our Lady of Trapani remained immobile in its niche. The date remained important for La Goulette’s much-reduced Catholic population, but it largely ceased to be an important event for the wider community.

Nostalgia

In 2017, the Catholic Church received permission to restart the procession, initially just inside the church compound. This year, when Al Jazeera visited, the procession left the church property but only travelled as far as the square outside.

Many attendees were young Tunisian Muslims, with little connection to La Goulette’s historic Sicilian population.

A major reason for this is undoubtedly the high status accorded to the Virgin Mary in Islam – an entire chapter of the Quran is dedicated to her.

Other participants seemed to be drawn by a feeling of nostalgia for La Goulette’s multiethnic, multireligious past.

“I love the procession”, Rania, 26, told Al Jazeera. “Lots of people have forgotten about it now, but European immigration is such an important part of Tunisia’s history”.

Rania, a student, told Al Jazeera of her love for the 1996 film, Un ete a La Goulette (A Summer in La Goulette).

Featuring dialogue in three languages, and evocative shots of sunlit courtyards and shimmering beaches, the film is an ode to La Goulette’s past.

Directed by the renowned Tunisian filmmaker Ferid Boughedir, it follows the lives of three teenage girls – Gigi, a Sicilian, Meriem, a Muslim, and Tina, a Jew – over the course of a summer in the 1960s.

The film ends, however, on a bleak note, with the outbreak of the 1967 War between Israel and several Arab states, and the subsequent departure of almost all of Tunisia’s remaining Jewish and European residents.

New migrations

As Tunisia’s European population declined, the country has seen an influx of new migrant communities from sub-Saharan Africa.

The majority of these new migrants, who number in the tens of thousands, hail from Francophone West Africa. Many come to Tunisia in search of work; others hope to find passage across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Many of the sub-Saharan migrants – who face widespread discrimination in Tunisia – are Christian, and as a result, they now make up the vast majority of Tunisia’s churchgoing population.

This fact is reflected in a mural in the church in La Goulette, inspired by the feast of Our Lady of Trapani. Painted in 2017, it depicts the Virgin Mary sheltering a group of people – Tunisians, Sicilians and sub-Saharan Africans – under her mantle.

The air around the Virgin in the mural is full of passports. The church’s priest, Father Narcisse, who hails from Chad, told Al Jazeera that these represent the documents that immigrants throw into the sea while making the journey from North Africa to Europe in the hope of evading deportation.

The mural highlights the fact that the Madonna of Trapani, once considered the protector of Sicilian fishermen, is today called upon by immigrants of far more varied backgrounds.

“This celebration, in its original form, marked the deep bonds between the two shores of the Mediterranean,” Archbishop of Tunis Nicolas Lhernould told Al Jazeera. “Today, it brings together a more diverse group – Tunisians, Africans, Europeans; locals, migrants, and tourists.”

“Mary herself was a migrant,” Archbishop Lhernould said, referring to the New Testament story which narrates Mary’s flight, together with the child Jesus and her husband Joseph, from Palestine to Egypt.

From a Christian perspective, he suggested, “we are all migrants, just passing through, citizens of a kingdom which is not of this world”.

The spirit of La Goulette

La Goulette was once home to ‘Little Sicily’, an area characterised by its clusters of Italian-style apartment buildings. The vast majority of these structures – modest buildings built by the newly-arrived fishermen – have been torn down and replaced, and little more than the church remains to testify to the area’s once significant Sicilian presence.

As of 2019, there were only 800 Italians descended from the original immigrant community left in the whole of Tunisia.

“There are so few of us left”, said Rita Strazzera, who was born in Tunis to Sicilian parents. The Tunisian-Sicilian community meets very rarely, she explained, with some members coming together for the celebration on the 15th August, and holding occasional meetings in a small bookshop opposite the church.

Still, the spirit of Little Sicily has not entirely vanished. Traces of the old La Goulette linger – in memory, in film, and, Strazzera told Al Jazeera, in other, more surprising ways as well.

“Every year, on All Saints’ Day, I go to the graveyard”, said Strazzera, referring to the annual celebration when Catholics remember their deceased loved ones.

“And there are Tunisians there, Muslims, people who maybe had a Sicilian parent, or a Sicilian grandparent, and have come to visit their graves, because they know it’s what Catholics do.”

“There have been lots of mixed marriages”, Strazzera added, “and so, every year, there are more of them visiting the graves. When I see them, it’s like a reminder that Little Sicily is still with us.”

A top Border Patrol commander touted dozens of arrests in North Carolina’s largest city Sunday as Charlotte residents reported encounters with federal immigration agents near churches and apartment complexes.

The Trump administration has made the Democratic city of about 950,000 people its latest target for an immigration enforcement surge it says will combat crime, despite fierce objections from local leaders and data showing declining crime rates.

Gregory Bovino, who led hundreds of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on a similar operation in Chicago, went on social media to document some of the arrests he said numbered more than 80 in Charlotte. He posted pictures of people the administration commonly dubs “criminal illegal aliens,” in reference to people living in the U.S. without legal permission who are alleged to have criminal records. That included one of a man with an alleged history of drunk driving convictions.

“We arrested him, taking him off the streets of Charlotte so he can’t continue to ignore our laws and drive intoxicated on the same roads you and your loved ones are on,” Bovino wrote on X.

The effort was dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a play on the title of the beloved E.B. White children’s book, which isn’t about North Carolina — and whose story of friendship and solidarity with a seemingly doomed farm animal would appear antithetical to the federal crackdown.

The flurry of activity immediately raised questions, including where detainees would be held, how long the operation would run and what agents’ tactics that have been heavily criticized elsewhere would look like in North Carolina.

Bovino’s operations in Chicago and Los Angeles triggered a series of lawsuits and investigations over questions about use of force, including wide deployment of chemical agents. Democratic leaders in both cities said that agents’ presence inflamed community tensions and led to violence. During the Chicago area operation, federal agents fatally shot one suburban man during an attempted traffic stop.

Bovino and other Trump administration officials have called the use of force an appropriate response to growing threats on agents’ lives.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Patrol, did not respond to inquiries about the Charlotte arrests. Bovino’s spokesman did not return a request for comment Sunday.

Elsewhere, Homeland Security has not offered many details about who it is arresting. For instance, in Chicago, the agency provided names and details on only a handful of its more than 3,000 arrests in the metro region from September to last week. In several instances U.S. citizens were handcuffed and detained during operations, and dozens of demonstrators were also charged, often in community clashes over arrests or protests.

By Sunday, reports of CBP activity were “overwhelming” and difficult to quantify, Greg Asciutto, executive director of the community development group CharlotteEast, said in an email.

“The past two hours we’ve received countless reports of CBP activity at churches, apartment complexes and a hardware store,” he said.

City Councilmember-elect JD Mazuera Arias said federal agents appeared to be focused on churches and apartment complexes.

“Houses of worship. I mean, that’s just awful,” he said. “These are sanctuaries for people who are looking for hope and faith in dark times like these and who no longer can feel safe because of the gross violation of people’s right to worship.”

Tareen, Witte and Dale write for the Associated Press. Tareen and Dale reported from Chicago, Witte from Annapolis, Md.

What would Jesus do if his early years were told as an unremarkable horror film?

It would probably be another opportunity to forgive, along with the very easy act of forgetting “The Carpenter’s Son,” a dingy alt-biblical slog that doesn’t even have the kitschy sense to use Nicolas Cage properly as a paranoid Joseph who isn’t sure if his kid comes from the good place or the bad one.

Writer-director Lotfy Nathan’s inspiration is an apocryphal 2nd century text called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which purports to describe the incident-filled childhood of a temperamental Jesus. It’s never been widely accepted Christian canon, but there’s no reason why what isn’t holy scripture couldn’t be a holy-moly script. In the Egyptian-American filmmaker’s retelling, a mixed-up boy (Noah Jupe) running from persecution with his devout dad, the Carpenter (Cage), and ethereal mother (a blank-faced FKA Twigs) is a superhero in waiting, with a bloody gauntlet of nightmares to get through first.

One of those is surviving his own birth, presented here in a sequence of torchlit, squishy labor that’s far from the twinkly manger of Christmas-diorama harmony. Onscreen, the text reads “Anno Domini,” in case it’s not clear whose umbilical cord is getting cut. “They’re coming for him,” his papa intones. Mom’s anguished childbirth moaning segues to those of young women nearby having their babies ripped from their arms and thrown into a bonfire. Barely escaping the scrutiny of the king’s killers, this new family escapes.

A time shift takes us to when the boy is 15 (not to mention sullen, bored-looking and wracked by violent visions of crucifixion). Our trio lands in a remote settlement that affords them the chance at a simple life, albeit under the Carpenter’s strict precautions against evil spirits: boarded windows, lots of praying, staying clean and making sure the boy sticks to his schooling. Attractive mute girl Lilith (Souheila Yacoub) draws the lad’s peeping gaze. But then there’s the young androgynous figure with mysterious scars (Isla Johnston), who seems intent on giving the new kid lessons in rule-breaking, not to mention cynical guidance about his destiny.

“You know who I am, but who are you?” this coaxing stranger offers, which is like a playground retort twisted to sound pseudo-philosophical. Nathan, via his thoroughly pedestrian directorial style, never exactly masks who it is anyway. But it sure makes for monotonous viewing. Meanwhile, the petulant Jesus starts feeling his powers and is suddenly called a savior by some, a malevolent sorcerer by others. Mostly, he’s one more uninteresting movie juvenile.

With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, “The Carpenter’s Son” is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for. But it really feels like a wasted opportunity when Cage is onscreen, sporting what appears to be a middle-aged man’s attempt at a Rachel haircut, saddled with boring dialogue about faith and fear and generally behaving like a reformed maniac under sedation.

“The Carpenter’s Son” wants to mix it up with an invented (and what some might call blasphemous) narrative about that time Satan almost seduced brooding teenage Jesus. But not letting Cage go biblical? That’s some kind of sin against cinema.

The most insulting thing about the success of Breaking Rust, an artificial intelligence “artist” that topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales Chart this week, is the titles of the hits.

“Walk My Way.”

“Living on Borrowed Time.”

The EP — which is also on the charts — is called “Resilient,” as if Breaking Rust spent years playing for tips in empty bars. And maybe Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, who is credited for writing the songs, did. But the bluesy voice we hear singing about pain and suffering did not overcome anything.

In fact, you could say this completely computer-generated country singer found chart success by mocking people. A year ago, a handful of loud industry folks in Nashville questioned whether Beyoncé, who was born and raised in Texas, was country enough to do a country album. Good times. Today AI-generated “performers” such as Breaking Rust and Xania Monet, which hit the Billboard R&B charts, are suggesting you don’t even need to be human to fit into those genres.

Eric Church, whose latest release “Evangeline vs. the Machine,” was nominated this month in the best contemporary country album category at the Grammys, told me he’s not too worried because fans still want to see live shows and “AI algorithm is not going to be able to walk on stage and play.” He says that the best thing the industry can do is establish AI music as its own genre and that award shows should establish a separate category.

“I think it’s a fad,” he said, adding that he finds it fun. “When people like a song or connect with an artist the ultimate thing for them is then to go experience that artist with people who also like that artist, that’s the ultimate payoff. You’re not going to be able to do that with AI.”

Church wraps up touring on Saturday at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood. In addition to promoting the new album, this year his foundation began providing housing for victims of Hurricane Helene using funds from a benefit concert. The North Carolina native also released a single to raise funds to help his neighbors. You know, things only a flesh-and-blood artist can do. Regarding Breaking Rust, he said: “The better thing we should be doing is making the general public aware that it’s AI because … I don’t think they know that.”

“The biggest problem is the ability to deceive people or manipulate people because it looks real, it sounds real, it’s pretty disingenuous if you didn’t say it,” Church told me. “I’ve seen stuff from me that is online.… They take my face and they put it on another body.… My mom sent me one and I was like, ‘Mom, that’s not me.’

“That’s where it gets dangerous and that’s where it gets scary.”

If AI-generated “musicians” like Breaking Rust are a passing fad, as Church suggests, it’s one that’s been 50 years in the making. While use of the voice box on recordings goes back to the 1960s, it was the 1975 recording of Peter Frampton’s double live album, “Frampton Comes Alive,” that popularized its use. In the 1980s Zapp had a string of gold albums with front man Roger Troutman using the voice box technology to make his voice sound futuristic, and in the 1990s AutoTune went from being a tool producers use to fine-tune a singer’s pitch on a recording to being the featured sound on a recording. This gave us Cher’s global chart-topper “Believe.”

Over the decades, technology in the studio has made it possible for the vocally challenged to usurp craftsmanship and talent.

Before MTV debuted in 1981, we were warned that video was going to kill the radio star. That obviously didn’t happen. And now, AI-generated video can theoretically replace filmed human performances. But even that should not be a threat to real stars.

As with most things in life, when expertise is devalued, it’s easier to pass trash off as treasure. AutoTune and AI are enabling people who lack musical talent to game the system — like audio catfish.

When an artist like Church sings of heartbreak, listeners can identify with his lived experience. However, Breaking Rust is on the top of the charts with a song called “Walk My Way” … and the entity singing those words has never taken a step.

That’s not to say an AI ditty can’t be catchy. It most certainly can be. I just wonder: If the artist isn’t real, how can the art be?

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

When millions of European immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century only to be scorned by mainstream society, it was the Catholic Church that embraced them, taught that keeping the customs of one’s native lands was not bad and created systems of mutual aid and education for the newcomers that didn’t rely on the government.

The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic, showed that the U.S. was ready to expand its definition of who could become president. Labor organizers like Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day and Mother Jones pushed for the dignity of workers while frequently citing the woke words of Jesus — the Sermon of the Mount and the Beatitudes among the wokest — as the fuel for their spiritual fire.

Catholicism is the faith I was baptized in, the one I embraced as a teen and that’s the bedrock for my moral code of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. My work desk covered with statues and devotional cards of Jesus, Mary and the saints is a physical testament to this.

But I’m also one of the 72% of U.S. Catholics that a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. found don’t attend weekly Mass, which we’re obligated to do.

I stopped going early on in my adulthood because the Church became something I didn’t recognize.

The bishops and cardinals who preached we should follow Jesus’ admonition we should tend to the least among us presided over a child sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and 2000s that cost parishioners billions of dollars in legal settlements and their ethical high ground. The obsession that too many of those same church leaders had over abortion and homosexuality — which Christ never talked about — over social justice matters during the Obama administration left me disappointed. Their continual condemnation of pro-choice Catholic Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for taking Communion while staying silent about Donald Trump’s constant violations of the Ten Commandments was rank hypocrisy.

The Pew Research Center found 55% of my fellow faithful voted for Trump. Key Catholics have blessed Trump’s uglier tendencies: A majority of them rules over our revanchist Supreme Court while the president’s team features a vice president who’s a convert and a rogue’s gallery of influential insiders that bear surnames from previous generations of Catholic diasporas — Kennedy, Rubio, Bovino, Homan among the worst of the worst.

Yet I remain a Catholic because you shouldn’t turn your back so easily on institutions that formed you and you don’t cede your identity to heretics. The election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to head the Holy See, to succeed Pope Francis stirred in me the sense that things might change for the better as our country worsens.

Now, without naming him, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has rebuked Trump on his signature issue and one close to my heart in a way that shows my hope hasn’t been in vain.

Clergy attend the 2021 Fall General Assembly meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, Md.

(Julio Cortez/Associated Press)

This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a so-called “special message” to blast Trump’s deportation Leviathan, decrying its “vilification of immigrants” “the, indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and how hundreds of thousands of residents have “arbitrarily lost their legal status.” Citing passages from across the Bible — the Gospel, the Old Testament, the Letters of Paul — to argue for the human worth of the undocumented and the holy mandate that we must care about them, it was the first time since 2013 that American bishops collectively authored such a statement.

Even as a majority of U.S. Catholics have gone MAGA, support for the special message was overwhelming: 216 bishops voted in favor, 5 against, and there were 3 abstentions. Their missive even concluded with a shout-out to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown, pregnant apparition of the Virgin Mary who’s the patroness of the Americas for Catholics.

Talk about someone who would get deported if la migra saw Her on the street.

The cruelty this administration has shown throughout its deportation campaign — families torn apart as easily as the Constitution; U.S. citizens detained; wanton federal violence that a federal judge in Chicago described as “shock[ing] the conscience” — has become one of the most pressing moral issues of our times. The call by Catholic bishops to oppose this wrong is important — so like a voice crying in the wilderness, the church must set an example for the rest of the country to follow.

This example already is being set in parishes across Southern California.

Priests and deacons have marched at rallies and prayed for those detained and deported from Orange County to downtown L.A. and beyond. Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights has let local activists stage know-your-rights workshops since Trump won last November. While L.A archbishop José H. Gomez and Diocese of Orange bishop Kevin Vann, the two most senior Catholic prelates in the region, have spoken out forcefully against immigration raids, some of their local brother bishops have pushed harder.

Diocese of San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas has allowed Catholics who are afraid of la migra to skip Mass since July after immigration agents detained migrants on church property, arguing “such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience” for his flock. In San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham — who’s been in his seat for only four months — helped launch a program encouraging religious leaders to accompany migrants to immigration court to bear witness to the injustices inside and has participated himself.

Expect to hear gnashing of the teeth from the conservative side of church pews about how everyone should respect the rule of law and to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s as if there ever was a Pope Donald. Already, Trump border czar Tom Homan has cried that the bishops are “wrong” for issuing their pro-immigrant letter and suggested they focus on “fixing the Catholic Church.”

But Homan’s dismissal and that of his fellow travelers doesn’t make the bishop’s admonition against Trump’s policies any more prophetic. The president’s immigration dictates are out of Herod — no less an authority than Pope Leo described them in October as “inhuman,” told a delegation of American bishops that “the church cannot remain silent” on those outrages and stated in a separate speech that such abuse was “not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”

The Catholic Church never will be as progressive as some want it to be. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released its message, the group elected as its next president Diocese of Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, whose public politics have so far mostly aligned with those of his deep-red state. But on the issue of dignity for immigrants during the Trump era, U.S. bishops have been on the right side of history — and God. They criticized Trump’s Muslim ban and his move to separate undocumented parents from their children during his first administration and have kept a watch on his attempt to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows some people who came to this country as children to legally remain in the U.S.

We’re about to enter the Christmas season, a holiday based on the story of a poor family seeking shelter in an era when their kind was rejected by the powers that be and ultimately had to flee home. It’s the story of the United States as well, one too many Americans have forsaken and that Trump wants all of us to forget.

May Catholics remind their fellow Americans anew of how powerful and righteous standing up for the stranger is.

From ornately frescoed churches in Florence, to rock-hewn chapels in Greece, stained-glass filled sanctuaries in France or tiny seaside shrines in Cornwall, the UK and Europe has a stunning variety of churches and cathedrals. Whether it was a small rural discovery or a grandiose urban affair, we want to hear about favourite discoveries on your travels.

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