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| Pope Leo to visit Assisi 40 years after historic prayer meeting |
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Posted by: Stone - 4 hours ago - Forum: Pope Leo XIV
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Pope Leo to visit Assisi 40 years after historic prayer meeting
From October 25 to 27, Assisi will host an interreligious peace prayer, the 40th annual meeting in a series initiated by Pope St John Paul II.
![[Image: cq5dam.thumbnail.cropped.750.422.jpeg]](https://www.vaticannews.va/content/dam/vaticannews/multimedia/2022/06/30/01526_PERUGIA-ASSISI1986.jpg/_jcr_content/renditions/cq5dam.thumbnail.cropped.750.422.jpeg)
Vatican News | October 6, 2026
40 years ago, on October 27, 1986, Pope St John Paul II took part in the historic World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, central Italy. For the first time in history, representatives of all world religions were invited by the Pope to pray together for peace.
Among those inspired by that meeting was the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic lay organisation, which since then has continued to promote what is known as the ‘Spirit of Assisi’ every year across Europe and beyond.
This year’s event be attended by Pope Leo XIV. “We are truly delighted by the Holy Father’s return to Assisi,” said the local bishop, Monsignor Felice Accrocca. “We firmly believe that the Pope’s presence, together with all the other religious leaders, can reinforce the shared journey against every form of violence.”
![[Image: cq5dam.thumbnail.cropped.750.422.jpeg]](https://www.vaticannews.va/content/dam/vaticannews/multimedia/2022/06/30/01557_PERUGIA-ASSISI1986.jpg/_jcr_content/renditions/cq5dam.thumbnail.cropped.750.422.jpeg)
The meeting in Assisi in 1986
[Rest of article here.]
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| Catholic clergy participate in First Nations ritual in Ottawa cathedral |
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Posted by: Stone - 4 hours ago - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Catholic clergy participate in First Nations ritual in Ottawa cathedral
A purification ritual involving smoke, sacred plants, an indigenous hymn, and prayers to the four directions preceded a Mass at Ottawa’s Notre-Dame Basilica.
![[Image: smudgingg-e1791305595685.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smudgingg-e1791305595685.jpg)
OTTAWA, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) — The Notre-Dame Basilica in Ottawa marked Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation last week with a special Mass that included an indigenous purification ceremony and other pagan practices.
After the procession and opening hymn of the September 30 Mass, celebrated by Father Daryold Winkler, a woman offered a “land acknowledgment,” followed by a purification ritual that involved fanning smoke over those present as an indigenous hymn was recited before the four directions prayer.
The subsequent four directions prayer used “sacred plants,” including sweet grass, cedar, sage, and tobacco, to “purify” the space with a prayer facing each of the four cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) of the 19th-century cathedral.
The Catholic clergy present each participated in these pagan rituals before the Mass officially began.
While the Catholic Church has always sought to bring people of all cultures together, it has also always condemned the concept of syncretism, or the blending of pagan and other non-Catholic rituals, such as indigenous purification ceremonies, with Catholic practices.
“As we begin this evening’s celebration, let us take a moment to acknowledge the sacred land on which we gather. We recognize and honor the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin … whose stewardship of this land continues to inspire our journey toward truth and reconciliation,” the unidentified laywoman said during the leftist “land acknowledgment.
In recent years, the Canadian Church has incorporated pagan indigenous rituals into Catholic Masses as well as given in to leftist narratives about the country’s residential schools.
Perhaps most notably, during Pope Francis’ visit to Canada in 2022, the 266th pontiff attended a “healing dance” in Maskwacis, Alberta, that appeared to direct worship to “Mother Earth.”
Before the event, the master of ceremonies explained that a “healing dance” was about to occur while outlining that the drum involved is “the heartbeat of Mother Earth, the drum is life.” During the pagan ritual, Indigenous people gathered in a circle around a large tree branch, chanting and playing the drum as others dressed in feathers and other traditional outfits began dancing.
Francis, along with four Indigenous chiefs donning traditional headdresses and garb, sat on a stage slightly above the dance, giving them a view of the happenings.
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| Holy Mass in New Hampshire - October 11, 2026 |
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Posted by: Stone - Yesterday, 07:20 PM - Forum: October 2026
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Holy Sacrifice of the Mass - Feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
w/Commemoration of the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Date: Sunday, October 11, 2026
Time: Confessions - 10:00 AM
Holy Mass - 10:30 AM
Location: The Oratory of the Sorrowful Heart of Mary
66 Gove's Lane
Wentworth, NH 03282
Contact: 315-391-7575
sorrowfulheartofmaryoratory@gmail.com
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| Council “Anti-Islamophobia” Training Tells Staff The Virgin Mary WORE A HIJAB |
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Posted by: Stone - Yesterday, 09:18 AM - Forum: Global News
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Council “Anti-Islamophobia” Training Tells Staff The Virgin Mary WORE A HIJAB
And instructs “the hijab was prevalent in the UK 100 years ago”
![[Image: Mary.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1]](https://i0.wp.com/modernity.news/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Mary.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1)
Steve Watson | 2nd October 2026
North Yorkshire staff who handle anti-terror work were shown a slide stating that “Mother Mary wore a hijab.” The line was used to argue that Islam’s attitude to women does not conflict with Western values. The same presentation told them “Jesus grew a beard,” as Muslim men are instructed to, and that “the hijab was prevalent in the UK only 100 years ago,” illustrated with pictures of British shawls that have nothing to do with Islam.
Mary was a Jewish woman in first-century Judea. She lived about six centuries before Islam, and centuries before the hijab as it is understood today. No image of her, or of Jesus, was made for centuries after their lifetimes. Early Christian art first showed Jesus as a beardless youth.
None of that stopped a publicly funded programme from feeding the claim to council staff, and from putting related material in front of police officers, students and civil servants who run the Prevent counter terror program.
The session was delivered by Abbas Najib, a former police officer and chief executive of Better Communities Bradford, the charity behind Project Unity. The Telegraph reported that the charity has received £490,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund since 2019, including a £35,000 grant to roll the programme out. Najib has said Project Unity has been delivered to more than 2,500 people across West and North Yorkshire.
Najib confirmed the slide to LBC and said the programme stands by it. “Hijab is an Arabic word meaning a covering, and in everyday use it simply means a woman’s head covering,” he claimed.
He further suggested “Mary is depicted wearing one in Christian art across the centuries, and headscarves were common among women in Britain within living memory. The point of the slide is that covering the head is a shared tradition across faiths and cultures, not something foreign or unique to Islam.”
That is a semantic trick dressed up as history. A veil in later Christian art is not a hijab. A headscarf worn by a British woman in 1920 is not Islamic dress. Calling either one a hijab writes a seventh-century religion backwards onto a first-century Jewish woman, then presents the rewrite as proof that criticism of modern Islamic practice is a myth.
The Mary slide was not an isolated flourish. Project Unity material, which has also reportedly been presented to students, police officers and civil servants responsible for Prevent, includes a defence of Sharia.
One slide states: “Sharia is not a foreign threat. It is a moral tradition – like any other – shaped by faith, reason and a commitment to human dignity.”
Another says one element of Islamic jurisprudence requires that “children cannot be struck on the face, cannot be marked, and must freely consent to marriage.” Pro-Palestinian marches are described in the talks as “protesting genocide.”
Written material accompanying the sessions claims women are not oppressed by the stipulations of Islam, and that “Muslims, the immigrant, the brown person” were scapegoated for a flatlining economy, with the blame laid on “the rich.”
North Yorkshire Council has tried to put distance between itself and the content. Odette Robson, the council’s head of community safety and CCTV, said the session was a guest presentation at the York and North Yorkshire Hate Crime Conference in 2025, a joint event with City of York Council and North Yorkshire Police, and that Najib was not paid.
“Attendees were free to question evidence, test assertions and explore alternative viewpoints,” she said, adding “The purpose was to encourage discussion and reflection rather than to promote any particular standpoint.”
The councillors who have seen the material are not buying the distinction. Reform group leader Tom Seston said: “A Reform council would scrap all DEI initiatives such as this and put council staff back to work delivering for residents, instead of receiving political lectures from anti-British activists. North Yorkshire Council should ban this activist and his charity from all work with the council.”
Independent councillor Michelle Donohue-Moncrieff, a Roman Catholic, said she was “deeply disturbed that taxpayers’ money was used to fund political propaganda being fed to council staff members. In particular, the reference to Mary, the Mother of God, wearing a hijab is both inaccurate and unacceptable.”
She added: “Mary is not just some random historical figure to be used to justify Islam. These types of references are not intended to explain Islam. They are a Trojan horse designed to diminish Roman Catholicism and Christianity as a whole. North Yorkshire Council should apologise and ensure that training of this nature never happens again.”
The same Project Unity material was used at that 2025 hate crime conference in front of North Yorkshire Police officers. Najib played a 2024 clip of Nigel Farage warning that “we have a growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, in fact loathe much of what we stand for,” and clarifying that he meant Muslims, citing marches over Israel’s actions in Palestine. Officers were then shown footage of a man racially abusing a Muslim bus driver and asked to weigh the two.
Najib’s question to the room: “Ask yourself, who is going to get into trouble between those two gentlemen? And who did the most harm?” He added the comparison he wanted them to sit with: “Sitting in a national news studio and saying ‘Jews hate Britain’, he’d be locked up before he left the studio, and too right, too.”
The police force has said the talk was not part of its training programme and was not delivered by a police employee. That does not change who was in the room, or what they were asked to conclude: that a politician’s words about integration may have done more harm than a racial assault.
Najib’s defence of that exercise is the same line he uses for the Mary slide. “Project Unity exists to reduce anti-Muslim hostility and strengthen trust between communities,” he said. Participants, he argued, were being asked to apply one standard, and to consider how the same words would land if said about Jewish people or black people.
The standard on offer is not equal treatment under the law. It is a demand that doubts about integration, grooming, Sharia, or the compatibility of political Islam with British institutions be treated as a species of hate.
This is not a rogue workshop in Yorkshire. In March 2026 the government published a non-statutory definition of “anti-Muslim hostility,” the rebrand it adopted after dropping “Islamophobia” under free-speech pressure, and promised a special representative to push it into schools, universities and public services.
The working group that shaped the definition was chaired by former attorney general Dominic Grieve. Every member of that panel has links to organisations successive governments have kept at arm’s length, including the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Engagement and Development.
The definition is not a criminal offence. Ministers have been careful to say so. What it is, in practice, is a script. Project Unity is what that script looks like when it reaches a conference room: Christian history renamed, Sharia redescribed as a moral tradition “like any other,” and an elected politician measured against a hate crime. The audience included people whose job is counter-terror work.
The other half of the machine is record-keeping. Officials at the Standards and Compliance Unit, the body set up to handle complaints about Prevent, have been logging social media posts that criticise the programme, including posts that accuse it of fixating on the “far Right” while soft-pedalling Islamist extremism. The database was withheld for more than a year and released only after an appeal to the Information Commissioner. Between March 2024 and February 2025 the unit made 77 such observations, mostly from X.
Jacob Smith of Rights & Security International, whose team forced the release, said: “It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent – and then storing that information. You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”
Put the pieces together. A lottery-funded charity tells anti-terror staff that the mother of Christ wore a hijab and that Sharia is not a foreign threat. The same charity asks police to decide whether Nigel Farage’s words did more harm than a man abusing a bus driver. A government panel with Islamist-linked members writes the definition those sessions are built to serve. A Home Office-linked unit keeps a list of people who say the counter-extremism programme has its priorities backwards.
None of this required a new blasphemy statute. All it required was grants, a conference slot, a working definition, and a database. The people supposedly paid to protect the public were the ones sat in the room being indoctrinated.
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| Cupich: Advocacy for immigrants ‘is, in its truest sense, an act of divine worship’ |
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Posted by: Stone - Yesterday, 09:05 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Cupich: Advocacy for immigrants ‘is, in its truest sense, an act of divine worship’
Cardinal Blase Cupich called immigrant advocacy an 'act of divine worship' while urging immigration reform and condemning enforcement
without distinguishing legal from illegal immigration.
![[Image: GettyImages-975957924.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/GettyImages-975957924.jpg)
Cardinal Blase Cupich
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Oct 5, 2026
(LifeSiteNews [slightly adapted - not all hyperlinks included from original]) — Heterodox Cardinal Blase Cupich told Catholics gathered for a “City of Welcome” event that advocacy for immigrants “belongs to every single disciple of Jesus, and it is, in its truest sense, an act of divine worship,” again collapsing legal and illegal immigration into a single moral claim.
The October 3 homily at the Archdiocese of Chicago celebration titled “Celebrating a City of Welcome, where Catholic Solidarity and the Journey of Migration Meet,” praised Chicago as a city “woven from the courageous journeys” of earlier immigrants, African American migrants, and more recent Latino and Asian communities.
Cupich then said the “spirit of welcome” has been “greatly diminished,” repeating the U.S. bishops’ November language about a “climate of fear,” “profiling,” “inhumane immigration enforcement,” “vilification of immigrants,” detention conditions, loss of legal status, and “the separation of children from their parents.” He said the bishops “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and called “significant immigration reform” the “only road ahead.”
As in his earlier defenses of migrants against the Trump administration, Cupich made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. He identified Christ with “undocumented workers” who “are exploited because they lack legal protection,” and he treated the journey of a mother who “walks thousands of miles with her children” as an encounter with the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. Citing Matthew 25 and St. John Chrysostom, he pointed out that indifference to the stranger is a “fundamental breakdown of eucharistic logic,” and that serving immigrants is “eucharistic discipleship” rather than “mere social work.”
The cardinal’s practical demands followed the same line: legislators must pass “significant and common-sense immigration reform”; law enforcement must “humanely carry out their work,” with accountability for those who “wantonly violate human rights”; clergy must have access to detainees; and parishes should expand efforts to “feed, clothe, house, and educate those in need.” The homily closed by repeating that advocacy for immigrants is “an act of divine worship.”
Nations may regulate borders, not obliged to admit all
Cupich’s message failed to mention the heinous crimes committed by gang members and others who have entered the United States illegally or how those crimes violate the human dignity of citizens and of other migrants.
The heterodox cardinal also ignored the Church’s perennial teaching that political authority may regulate borders and that migrants are obliged to obey the just laws of the country that receives them.
Nations are not obliged to admit everyone who wishes to enter. Equating opposition to enforcement with worship obscures that distinction and conflates a prudential policy dispute into a test of Eucharistic faith.
The homily fits a pattern LifeSiteNews has reported since President Donald Trump returned to office. In February, Cupich was to celebrate an Ash Wednesday Mass and procession “in solidarity” with migrants in Melrose Park. Earlier that month, he thanked Chicago priests for their defense of migrants, writing that deportation policy had created “a great crisis,” that families were separated, children traumatized, and asylum seekers treated “inhumanely.”
Cupich compares immigration crisis to Holocaust
After last January’s tragic killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minnesota — for which it is possible to be appalled while still recognizing America’s immigration problem — Cupich compared the escalation between protesters and ICE with the events of World War II: “The Holocaust didn’t begin when they opened concentration camps. It began with words.”
In November 2025 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued its first “Special Message” in over a decade to criticize what it called “indiscriminate mass deportation.” The Vatican under Popes Francis and Leo has likewise denounced efforts to curb mass immigration.
Pope Leo has said the faithful will be judged for how they “receive the foreigner,” and he has suggested that that supporting the purported “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” calls into question whether someone is pro-life. Cupich has said he often borrows that language.
Bishop Strickland charges pope, USCCB with indifference to crime by illegal immigrants
Other bishops, such as Bishop Joseph Strickland, have called out the majority of U.S. bishops and the Vatican for disregarding the crimes of illegal aliens.
“You harm the little ones when you promote lawlessness and turn a blind eye to the rapes, the murders and the attacks of nefarious criminals who waltz across open borders,” the bishop said.
“Some of the little ones are caught up in these mass migrations and trampled upon as they seek a better life. Some of the little ones find their homes and towns invaded as shepherds say ‘we must welcome the stranger,’ and then allow marauders and criminals free rein,” he added.
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| Raleigh bishop allows pagan prayer ritual in Catholic church |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-05-2026, 08:51 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Raleigh bishop allows pagan prayer ritual in Catholic church
A pagan 'smudging' ceremony and 'prayer in the four directions' took place in a Catholic Church
under the watch of the bishop of Raleigh during a celebration of 'multiculturalism.'
![[Image: shutterstock_1782050000.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/shutterstock_1782050000.jpg)
Shutterstock
Oct 2, 2026
(LifeSiteNews) — It has come to light that the bishop of Raleigh, North Carolina presided over a shamanistic “smudging” ceremony to celebrate St. Catherine “Kateri” Tekakwitha, who rejected her native Mohawk religion.
Pascua Taqui tribe member Richard Duran led the congregation of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Durham in a “smudging” ceremony in July, according to an archived page of North Carolina Catholics, a diocesan publication. Smudging is a shamanic ritual that involves burning herbs and resins to “cleanse” a space of negative energy and “brin(g) in good spirits,” according to a Native American site. The smoke is “shared with people as an act of prayer and spiritual connection,” NC Catholics reported.
“Father David Miller, who is chaplain to the Native American Catholic Community in the diocese and has ancestral ties to the Shawnee, Lenape and Cherokee tribes of his home state of Oklahoma, offered a traditional prayer in the four directions,” the report stated.
The prayer in the four directions is a pagan prayer traditionally understood to be directed to the Creator but also calls upon “spirits” associated with the North, South, East and West.
Despite its pagan origins, a version of the Prayer to the Four Directions is promoted by the Catholic Tekakwitha Conference. As shared by a Native American website, the prayer states, “Man did not create the web of life, but he is a strand in it. Whatever man does to the web, he does to himself.”
Ryan Dial of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina also introduced three Native traditional dances, performed by his wife, his sister, and another Native American. After lunch, Dial delivered a presentation on “colonization, false dichotomies, native religion and how to become an ally.”
Renée Fisher, an African Ancestry Ministry and Evangelization Network (AAMEN) and Native American Church (NAC) administrative assistant, encouraged those present to “embrace the whole world that surrounds them” while also treating traditions with reverence and remaining attuned, for example, to both the Church and Indigenous peoples. The idea that one should treat a pagan, Native tradition with reverence is contrary to the Catholic faith, since the honor and worship of false idols in pagan religions is an offense to God.
Bishop Luis Rafael Zarama of Raleigh earlier addressed the attendees, joking that he would dance “with his heart and not his body” during the celebration, NC Catholics said.
A flyer for the “multicultural celebration” reads “Sacred Earth, Sacred Unity: Walking Together with St. Kateri Tekakwitha,” and features an image of the saint superimposed on a cross.
St. Catherine “Kateri” Tekakwitha, who was renamed Catherine after St. Catherine of Siena, was a Mohawk Native American who converted to Catholicism at the age of 19 after coming into contact with French Jesuit missionaries from the age of 11. She took a vow of perpetual virginity and moved to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, near Montreal.
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| Pope Leo calls for the Church to be an ‘open house’ with no ‘judging’ |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-05-2026, 08:46 AM - Forum: Pope Leo XIV
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Pope Leo calls for the Church to be an ‘open house’ with no ‘judging’
Leo’s prayer that the Church ‘listens without judging’ suggests that the Church refrains from judging objective matters of sin.
Oct 2, 2026
(LifeSiteNews) –– Pope Leo XIV has stated that he wants the Church to be an “open house” that “listens without judging.”
“May your Church be an open house, a safe space where everyone has a place — a community that accompanies and never excludes; that listens without judging; and that draws near without fear,” Leo said in his prayer video for October 2026.
Leo’s prayer intentions are dedicated this month to those who suffer from anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses.
Christ Jesus and His Church indeed desire the healing of those who suffer from mental illness, and the Church is open to receiving anyone into her communion, provided they sincerely intend to live out the Catholic faith.
Leo’s prayer that the Church “listens without judging,” however, suggests or may easily be interpreted to suggest that the Church refrains from judging objective matters of sin. Rather, the Church in her charity defines situations in which sin, and especially mortal sin has been committed, so that the sinner may repent and be reconciled with God.
The prayer is reminiscent of Pope Francis’ repeated exhortations not to “judge.” He most famously said in 2013, regarding gay priests, “Who am I to judge?” In 2024, he urged people to remember Jesus Christ’s commandment to “never judge.”
Catholics cannot judge the subjective culpability of sinners, but Francis’ remark “Who am I to judge?” was widely interpreted by the mainstream media to mean that there is nothing wrong with homosexual behavior. This suggests similar statements from the pope that we should not “judge” will evoke similar interpretations.
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