What do Catholics believe? Pope chosen in conclave will lead one of the largest religions.
What do Catholics believe? Pope chosen in conclave will lead one of the largest religions.
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World leaders gather at Vatican for Pope Francis' funeral
Current and former U.S. presidents and other world leaders gathered at the Vatican for Pope Francis' funeral.
The Vatican announced this week that its College of Cardinals will convene on May 7 for the conclave process at the famed Sistine Chapel – where they'll elect Pope Francis' successor as leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
Francis, the 266th pontiff in the church's nearly 2000-year history, was interred over the weekend in the Basilica of St. Mary Major after a funeral service that drew dozens of global leaders and an estimated 400,000 mourners.
In the interim, the College of Cardinals is the acting head of the church. But the man who succeeds Francis will preside over a religious body comprising nearly 18% of the world's population, according to the University of California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
But what do Catholics believe? How do they differ from other Christians? Here's what to know.
Are Catholics Christian?
All Roman Catholics are Christians, but not the other way around. Christianity, according to Britannica.com, is a world religion rooted in the life, teachings and death of Jesus Christ, and Roman Catholicism is the largest of its three most significant offshoots.
In general, the reference site states, Roman Catholics veer from other branches of Christianity in their beliefs about the sacraments and the importance of the papacy, in addition to a focus on the saints and the Virgin Mary.
The church recognizes sacraments, or important rituals and processes, such as baptism and matrimony.
What is a saint?
Saints are persons in heaven who were officially canonized or not who did one of the following, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
Lived heroically virtuous lives.
Offered their life to others.
Died for their faith.
All saints must have lived lives worthy of imitation.
When was Roman Catholicism founded?
According to Britannica.com, Roman Catholicism traces back to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ in Roman-occupied Jewish Palestine around the year 30.
Roman Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380, according to Learn Religions, a reference site produced by full-time ministers, published authors, licensed clergy and teachers.
The religion would experience two major splits, first in 1054 with the Eastern Orthodox Church and then again with the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
How many Catholics are in the world?
There are an estimated 1.4 billion Catholic adherents around the world.
The Catholic News Agency earlier this year reported a slight increase in the number of Catholics globally, with the population growing to 1.406 billion in 2023 from 1.39 billion in 2022.
Much of the growth is happening in Africa, where the number of Catholics climbed more than 3%, from 272 million in 2022 to 281 million in 2023, the news agency said.
The Americas account for nearly 48% of the world's Catholics, according to Vatican News.
What do Catholics believe about the pope?
Catholics believe that each pope, the bishop of Rome, is a successor to the throne held by Saint Peter, with authority over the church, according to Britannica.
Early church fathers recognized the apostle Peter as the person to whom Jesus Christ intended to pass his authority when he said, 'You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church.' They also believe that Peter moved to Rome and was martyred there under the emperor Nero, though that is contested by some Protestants.
Catholics believe in the pope's authority to ensure the continuity of church teachings and Catholic unity worldwide. For Catholics, the pope acts as a moral compass by speaking out on matters of faith and principles; Francis focused on social justice and reaching out to marginalized communities.
Contributing: Julia Gomez
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Hamilton Spectator
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Continued failure to consult on uranium exploration a harmful mistake: Mi'kmaw Chiefs
HALIFAX - Nova Scotia's continued failure to consult with First Nations on uranium exploration is a mistake that will further erode the province's relationship with Mi'kmaq communities, says the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaw Chiefs and a lawyer from Sipekne'katik First Nation. Pictou Landing First Nation Chief Tamara Young said the Mi'kmaq people were neither consulted nor notified when Nova Scotia introduced then passed a bill that opens the province up to potential uranium mining and fracking. 'The lack of consultation is unacceptable and goes against the UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples),' Young said in a statement to The Canadian Press on Wednesday. The assembly has said they will continue to oppose both uranium exploration and hydraulic fracturing until their environmental concerns have been addressed. The provincial government added uranium to its list of priority critical minerals May 14, and it issued a request for exploration proposals for three sites with known deposits of the heavy metal. Interested companies had until Wednesday to submit their proposals. Premier Tim Houston has said the legislative changes are needed to help the province withstand economic challenges from American tariffs. 'We recognize there are international pressures and influences affecting our economy, but any resource development in Mi'kma'ki must include our consent and participation as we are the rightful owners of these lands, waters and resources,' Young said in the statement, speaking as co-lead of the environment, energy and mines portfolio on behalf of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaw Chiefs. Rosalie Francis, a Mi'kmaq lawyer whose firm is based out of Sipekne'katik First Nation, said the province risks further damaging their relationship with Mi'kmaq communities and sabotaging the potential uranium industry by failing to consult adequately and early. 'By choosing not to consult, it scares away investors, destroys the relationship and gets us back to starting at zero,' Francis said in an interview Tuesday. 'It all comes down to trust, and this completely diminishes any kind of trust that's essential to the relationship between the first for the Mi'kmaq and the province.' Nova Scotia has opened up three plots of land for uranium project proposals: an 80-hectare site in Louisville in Pictou County; a 64-hectare site in East Dalhousie in Annapolis County; and a 2,300-hectare site in Millet Brook in Hants County. Much of this is on private land. The government has previously said companies selected by the province would have to seek permission from landowners to explore. However, Section 26 of the province's Mineral Resources Act allows the natural resources minister to intervene if there is a stalemate. A spokesperson with the Department of Natural Resources said if a company decides it wants to develop a mine on one of these sites, then there is duty to consult with Mi'kmaq communities. Francis said that position is backwards, and is not in line with case law on the matter. 'It's been clear that duty to consult begins when, in the minds of government, they're anticipating activity that will affect rights,' Francis said, adding that should happen before a company has made a decision on the site. The lawyer said it would appear the province has not learned from the fall out of the Alton Gas cavern project, which was officially scrapped in fall 2021. The Alberta energy company abandoned its plan to create huge salt caverns north of Halifax to store natural gas more than 13 years after starting construction. The company said at the time the project experienced challenges and delays, referring to opposition the project faced from Indigenous protesters and allies who opposed the company's plan to remove large, underground salt deposits by flushing them out with water from the nearby Shubenacadie River. The plan also called for dumping the leftover brine into the tidal river, where it would flow into the Bay of Fundy. In March 2020, a decision by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court ordered the province to resume consultations with Sipekne'katik First Nation on the matter and determined the former environment minister was wrong when she concluded the province had adequately consulted with the First nation about the project. 'The province should have walked away from that decision and said: 'OK, lesson learned.' The project never went forward. All the gas investors looked at it and said: 'This is just a mess now. Let's just walk away,'' Francis said. The lawyer said it will be telling in the coming weeks if the province chooses to engage with Mi'kmaq communities or 'if the province will march along in the same way it did before.' 'Either we'll have a success story or we'll have another Alton Gas play out,' she said. Shiri Pasternak, a criminology professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-investigator of a research project called Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism, said the situation in Nova Scotia mirrors the expedited extraction movement that's happening across the country. 'What's happening to the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia is really proliferating as an attack on Indigenous and environmental rights across the country right now,' she said in an interview Tuesday. Pasternak said Nova Scotia is one of several provinces working to speed up extraction and development projects — moves that are supported by the federal government. 'We have this sweep of fast-tracked legislation and policy changes to the Environment Assessment Act, both provincially in Nova Scotia and in other places, but also federally in terms of the Impact Assessment Act in order to expedite development and extraction — most of which will be against the desires and the consent of Indigenous people across the country.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 12, 2025. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Yahoo
2 hours ago
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Continued failure to consult on uranium exploration a harmful mistake: Mi'kmaw Chiefs
HALIFAX — Nova Scotia's continued failure to consult with First Nations on uranium exploration is a mistake that will further erode the province's relationship with Mi'kmaq communities, says the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaw Chiefs and a lawyer from Sipekne'katik First Nation. Pictou Landing First Nation Chief Tamara Young said the Mi'kmaq people were neither consulted nor notified when Nova Scotia introduced then passed a bill that opens the province up to potential uranium mining and fracking. 'The lack of consultation is unacceptable and goes against the UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples),' Young said in a statement to The Canadian Press on Wednesday. The assembly has said they will continue to oppose both uranium exploration and hydraulic fracturing until their environmental concerns have been addressed. The provincial government added uranium to its list of priority critical minerals May 14, and it issued a request for exploration proposals for three sites with known deposits of the heavy metal. Interested companies had until Wednesday to submit their proposals. Premier Tim Houston has said the legislative changes are needed to help the province withstand economic challenges from American tariffs. 'We recognize there are international pressures and influences affecting our economy, but any resource development in Mi'kma'ki must include our consent and participation as we are the rightful owners of these lands, waters and resources,' Young said in the statement, speaking as co-lead of the environment, energy and mines portfolio on behalf of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaw Chiefs. Rosalie Francis, a Mi'kmaq lawyer whose firm is based out of Sipekne'katik First Nation, said the province risks further damaging their relationship with Mi'kmaq communities and sabotaging the potential uranium industry by failing to consult adequately and early. 'By choosing not to consult, it scares away investors, destroys the relationship and gets us back to starting at zero,' Francis said in an interview Tuesday. 'It all comes down to trust, and this completely diminishes any kind of trust that's essential to the relationship between the first for the Mi'kmaq and the province.' Nova Scotia has opened up three plots of land for uranium project proposals: an 80-hectare site in Louisville in Pictou County; a 64-hectare site in East Dalhousie in Annapolis County; and a 2,300-hectare site in Millet Brook in Hants County. Much of this is on private land. The government has previously said companies selected by the province would have to seek permission from landowners to explore. However, Section 26 of the province's Mineral Resources Act allows the natural resources minister to intervene if there is a stalemate. A spokesperson with the Department of Natural Resources said if a company decides it wants to develop a mine on one of these sites, then there is duty to consult with Mi'kmaq communities. Francis said that position is backwards, and is not in line with case law on the matter. 'It's been clear that duty to consult begins when, in the minds of government, they're anticipating activity that will affect rights,' Francis said, adding that should happen before a company has made a decision on the site. The lawyer said it would appear the province has not learned from the fall out of the Alton Gas cavern project, which was officially scrapped in fall 2021. The Alberta energy company abandoned its plan to create huge salt caverns north of Halifax to store natural gas more than 13 years after starting construction. The company said at the time the project experienced challenges and delays, referring to opposition the project faced from Indigenous protesters and allies who opposed the company's plan to remove large, underground salt deposits by flushing them out with water from the nearby Shubenacadie River. The plan also called for dumping the leftover brine into the tidal river, where it would flow into the Bay of Fundy. In March 2020, a decision by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court ordered the province to resume consultations with Sipekne'katik First Nation on the matter and determined the former environment minister was wrong when she concluded the province had adequately consulted with the First nation about the project. 'The province should have walked away from that decision and said: 'OK, lesson learned.' The project never went forward. All the gas investors looked at it and said: 'This is just a mess now. Let's just walk away,'' Francis said. The lawyer said it will be telling in the coming weeks if the province chooses to engage with Mi'kmaq communities or "if the province will march along in the same way it did before." "Either we'll have a success story or we'll have another Alton Gas play out," she said. Shiri Pasternak, a criminology professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-investigator of a research project called Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism, said the situation in Nova Scotia mirrors the expedited extraction movement that's happening across the country. "What's happening to the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia is really proliferating as an attack on Indigenous and environmental rights across the country right now," she said in an interview Tuesday. Pasternak said Nova Scotia is one of several provinces working to speed up extraction and development projects — moves that are supported by the federal government. 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3 hours ago
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‘Where was God?' The Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting 10 years later.
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up This was quite remarkable, because less than 48 hours earlier, on the night of June 17, 2015, Sanders had just closed her eyes in benediction — during Bible study at her beloved Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — when she was jolted by an explosion of gunfire. The 57-year-old woman, a fourth-generation member of 'Mother Emanuel,' the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, dove under a table and pulled her 11-year-old granddaughter down with her. She squeezed the child so tightly she feared she might crush her, instructing her to play dead as a 21-year-old white supremacist methodically assassinated nine of the 12 Black worshippers in the basement fellowship hall. Those she watched die included her 26-year-old son, Tywanza Sanders, who had tried vainly to distract the shooter, and her 87-year-old aunt, Susie Jackson, who was shredded by 10 hollow-point bullets. At one point, Sanders smeared her legs with the blood pooling at her feet so that the killer might think he had finished her off. It worked. What happened in court two days later, a procession of forgiveness by Black victims for a remorseless racist murderer, both awed and befuddled the world. Many found it to be the purest expression of Christianity they had ever witnessed and could not imagine ever being graced in any such way. With the help of a soaring and melodic eulogy for the victims by President Barack Obama, the church known as Mother Emanuel soon became an earthly emblem of amazing grace. FILE - Tyrone Sanders and Felicia Sanders comfort each other at the graveside of their son, Tywanza Sanders, on June 27, 2015, at Emanuel AME Cemetery in Charleston, S.C. (Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP, File) Grace Beahm/Associated Press Now fast-forward to December 2016. Felicia Sanders is back in court, the lead witness in the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof. She is under cross-examination by Roof's attorney, who is trying to establish that Roof threatened to kill himself that night, a desperate stab at a psychiatric defense. This time there is no nod by Sanders at forgiveness, no prayer for the soul of her son's unrepentant executioner. 'He say he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that,' Sanders responds coolly in her Lowcountry lilt, glaring at Roof from the stand. 'He's evil. There's no place on earth for him except for the pit of hell.' Roof's lawyer, blindsided, tries once more to prompt Sanders about Roof's suicidality. She is having none of it: 'Send himself back to the pit of hell, I say.' Had something changed about Felicia Sanders? Had she, in the 18 months between the Emanuel murders and the trial, forsaken the commitment to forgiveness that was such a hallmark of her faith and that had so moved the world? Not in the slightest, I concluded, while researching a book about the history of Mother Emanuel and the meaning of forgiveness in the African American church. To the contrary, Sanders and other church stalwarts helped me understand that the forgiveness expressed toward Dylann Roof had not been for Dylann Roof but rather for themselves. Those who appeared at Roof's bond hearing did not speak for everyone in the congregation, or even in their families. A decade later, some still describe the path to forgiveness as a journey they travel at their own pace. But the grace volunteered in June 2015 grew organically from the fiber of African Methodism, a denomination two centuries old. It obviously had deep scriptural roots — 'Forgive us our trespasses' and 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' But it also was an iteration of a timeworn survival mechanism that has helped African American Christians withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship, and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls and their sanity still, somehow, intact. One year after the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., relatives and friends of the slain gathered to honor their lives. Grace Beahm/Associated Press Churches like Emanuel, which has roots in antebellum Charleston, have long served as physical and spiritual refuges from the scourges that confront Black Americans. Its own long history, a two-century cycle of suppression and resistance, illuminates the relentless afflictions of caste in the city where nearly half of all enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Emanuel's predecessor congregation, which formed in 1817 after a subversive walkout from Methodist churches by free and enslaved Black Charlestonians, faced immediate harassment from white authorities. The police raided services and jailed worshippers by the scores. When an incipient slave insurrection plot was uncovered in 1822 and traced back in part to the church, 35 men were led to the gallows, nearly half of them from the congregation. The wood-frame building was dismantled by order of the authorities and the church's leading ministers forced into exile. Emanuel's founding pastor after the Civil War, Richard Harvey Cain, used its pulpit as a springboard into politics, winning seats in the state legislature and Congress in a career that mirrored at first the heady hope and then the stolen promise of Reconstruction. During the depths of Jim Crow, Charlestonians assembled at Emanuel to voice outrage over lynchings and jurisprudential travesties. Its civil rights era pastor, Benjamin J. Glover, also led Charleston's NAACP, staged peaceful protest marches from the church, and was repeatedly jailed. Congregants were urged to action there by Booker T. Washington (1909), W.E.B. DuBois (1921), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1962), and then, a year after King's assassination, by his widow, Coretta Scott King (1969). She came to support a hospital workers' strike that bore eerie echoes of the sanitation workers' strike that had drawn her husband to Memphis. Nearly five decades later, the first person shot by Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015, was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a remarkable prodigy who had been the youngest African American elected to South Carolina's legislature and was serving his fourth term in the state Senate. A horse-drawn carriage carried the casket of the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney past the Confederate flag and onto the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, S.C. on June 24, 2015. REUTERS The weight of it all takes the breath away. And for many, forgiveness might seem an inadequate response, given available options like anger, bitterness, hatred, revenge, retribution. A more natural one, perhaps a more human one, might even be 'Where was God?' But in interviews over the years, each of the six family members who spoke mercifully toward Dylann Roof explained that they did so for their own spiritual release. They depicted the moment in mystical terms — unpremeditated, unexpected, the words just flowed, it was God talking. But none said they meant for their words to be read as a grant of exoneration or a pass from accountability. No slate had been wiped. Indeed, some did not care much whether Roof lived or died (he remains on federal death row in Indiana, one of three inmates whose sentences were not commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the close of his term). Rather, the mothers and children and widowers of the dead described their brand of forgiveness as a purging of self-destructive toxins, a means for reversing the metastasis of rage, and at its most basic a way to get out of bed each morning in the face of it all. It served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a method not only of moral practice but of emotional self-preservation. Because the choice to forgive was one dignity that could not be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment. It might be mistaken for submission, but in Charleston it resurrected agency for victims who had been robbed of it. 'He is not a part of my life anymore,' the Rev. Anthony Thompson, the widower of Bible study leader Myra Thompson, told me in explaining his forgiveness of Roof. 'Forgiveness has freed me of that, of him, completely. I'm not going to make him a lifetime partner.' This may be disconcerting for some white Americans who found reassurance in the notion that those who forgave Dylann Roof were, by association, also forgiving — or at least moving beyond — the four-century legacy of white supremacy that contributed to his poisoning. They decidedly were not, and the question of whether we make serious progress toward eradicating the psychosis of race in this country and the inequities it bequeaths in wealth, education, housing, justice, and health, not to mention hope, awaits an answer on the 50th or 100th anniversary of the massacre at Mother Emanuel.
