A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – Pope Francis is pushing for a global authority that supersedes the rights of individual countries, all with the goal of pursuing the common good.

“Think of the great contemporary challenges of climate change, new slavery and peace,” he told members of the Pontifical Academy.

They met last week at the Vatican to discuss the topic of: “Nation, State, Nation-State.” [ Source: CBN News (Read More…) ]

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Roughly 80 percent of people who suffer persecution for their faith are Christian according to a recently released report obtained by Worthy News.

The Rt. Rev. Philip Mountstephen, Bishop of Truro, released his interim report on global Christian persecution at the end of April.

“Aggressive nationalism” and “ultra-nationalism” were cited as major driving factors of Christian persecution in Asia, such as in India, Burma, and China, where national identity and religious belief are seen as inseparable.

“In the ‘national sphere’, religious extremists/nationalists have carefully crafted an influential political narrative that states that Christianity is an alien or foreign religion,” the report states.

Among the most jarring statistics found in the report concerning the persecution of Christians was an estimate by the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) from 2009, which states that 80% of the people worldwide who suffer persecution for their faith are Christian.

A footnote to the report elaborates that although the statistic has recently been removed from the ISHR website, members of the NGO have maintained the figure’s accuracy in private conversations with Mountstephen and have even said that it is a conservative estimate.

Despite the magnitude of the Bishop’s findings, the report concludes with an admission that the panel of U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office members and NGO consultants who aided with the review regrettably “have not [yet even] analyzed the situation in Europe and Eurasia,” which could unearth even more evidence of Christian persecution.

The report, which was commissioned by U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt in 2018, is due to be completed in June and will include region-by-region analysis and case studies on the plight of believers globally.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton says a carrier strike group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln recently deployed to the Persian Gulf is “in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran.

Joined by a fleet of Air Force bombers, U.S. officials hope the naval unit’s presence will deter Iran from its threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for Middle East oil trade that sees 20% of the world’s oil supplies pass through its waters at one time or another.

In the developing tit-for-tat between the two countries, the U.S. declared its intention at the end of April to penalize customers of Iranian oil, hoping to bring Iranian oil exports to zero, a move preceded by a State Department memo earlier that month designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

The statement by Bolton goes on to read that the carrier group is a demonstration of U.S. readiness “to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces,” echoing avowals by other U.S. officials that blame for the actions of Shi’ite militia groups throughout the Middle East, like Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, will be laid at the feet of Iran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace on April 28th, warned that the Trump administration’s “policy of maximum pressure” against the Islamic Republic was “dragging the United States into a conflict,” along with U.S. allies Israel, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

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