HAVANA, Cuba – Pope Francis met Sunday with Fidel and Raúl Castro, the brothers who have ruled Cuba since its 1959 revolution, after celebrating an outdoor mass attended by hundreds of thousands.
HAVANA, Cuba – Pope Francis delivered mass Sunday before hundreds of thousands of people on Havana's iconic Revolution Square, calling Cubans to serve the downtrodden and warning them that "service is never ideological."
The regular bedlam of long ticket lines and spinning luggage machines at the Miami International Airport got an extra charge of emotion on the eve of Pope Francis's visit to Cuba, as hundreds of Cuban Americans prepared to make the hop across the Florida Straits on Friday.
An arms maker in Florida is engraving Christian symbols on its assault rifles, in a marketing ploy denounced by a Muslim group as fomenting "hatred, division and violence."
In a reminder that Costa Rica’s Catholic Church is still woefully stuck in the past, one of its highest leaders on Sunday used the annual pilgrimage to Cartago, which draws an estimated 2 million people each year, to speak out against legalizing gay civil unions and in vitro fertilization.
Many pilgrims come from afar to make good on different types of promises, such as Franklin Arturo Garita Quirós, from Paquera, Puntarenas, who was sued by the Environment Ministry in 1986 after he was accused of deforesting his property. He made a promise to the Virgin of Los Ángeles, known as "la negrita," that if he won the case, he would walk every year to her statue in Cartago, as he's done for the past 29 years.
This weekend pilgrims from across Costa Rica will begin walking – if they haven't already – to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles for an annual pilgrimage of faith known as the romería, where they will pay their respects to and ask for favors from the country’s patron saint, the Virgin of Los Ángeles.
