Report: Envelope with three bullets addressed to Pope Francis intercepted

Vatican City, Jan 24, 2018 / 10:12 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Speaking to members of the Yazidi community, a religious minority which has been persecuted by the Islamic State, Pope Francis said Wednesday that everyone has a fundamental right to freedom of religion, and no person or group has the power to deny it.

“It is unacceptable that human beings be persecuted and killed because of their religious affiliation! Every person has the right to freely profess his religious beliefs without constraints,” the Pope said Jan. 24 in a room adjoining the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall to representatives of the Yazidi community who have taken refuge in Germany.

“I raise my voice in favor of Yazidi rights, above all the right to exist as a religious community: no one can bestow on themselves the power to cancel a religious group because it is not part of those called ‘tolerated.’”

Yazidis are a religious minority largely from the Nineveh Plains in Iraq. Communities can also be found in Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, though many have fled to Europe, and particularly Germany, in response to religious persecution.

In March 2016, they were part of a group, which included Christians and Shia Muslims, declared to be victims of Islamic State genocide by the United States government. It marked the first time the U.S. had declared a genocide is taking place since 2004 in Darfur.

During the meeting, Francis voiced his support and prayers for the innocent victims of such “senseless and inhuman barbarism.”

He also expressed his concern for members of the Yazidi community who may still be in the hands of terrorists, stating his hope “that everything possible will be done to save them; as well as to trace the missing and to give identity and worthy burial to those killed.”

Even those who have been lucky enough to escape have still had to leave behind everything they had, he noted, deploring the “unspeakable violations” which have been committed against their fundamental human rights, such as abductions, slavery, torture, forced conversions, and killings.

“The international community cannot remain a silent and inert spectator in the face of your drama,” he said, adding an appeal to institutions and people of other communities to help them rebuild their homes and places of worship.

Even today, persecution against minorities, which includes Christians, continues, he pointed out, and said that the Holy See never tires “of intervening to denounce these situations, demanding recognition, protection and respect.”

“May God help us to build together a world where we can live in peace and brotherhood,” he concluded.

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Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., shares his perspective on how a legal system can provide for mercy during a conversation with Msgr. Laurence Spiteri (left) at the Vatican’s judicial headquarters on Sept. 20, 2025. / Credit: Hannah Brockhaus/CNA.

Vatican City, Sep 21, 2025 / 14:24 pm (CNA).

United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., spoke about the role that mercy can play in the legal system during an event at the Vatican on Saturday.

The Sept. 20 discussion at the Vatican’s judicial headquarters was organized by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, the U.S. bishops’ conference, and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization. The event was part of the Jubilee of Justice, part of the Church’s yearlong Jubilee of Hope.

Earlier in the day, Alito, a Catholic, greeted Pope Leo XIV following an audience for the Jubilee of Workers of Justice in St. Peter’s Square.

During a one-hour afternoon conversation with Msgr. Laurence Spiteri, an American priest and retired judge on the Vatican’s appeals court for marriage cases, Alito shared his perspective on how a legal system can provide for mercy.

“Justice is what everyone has a right to, it is what they are due … Mercy is something that we don’t necessarily merit,” Alito said. “The complete reconciliation of those two things, I think, is a mystery that we can only dimly, perhaps, perceive in this world.”

The 75-year-old Alito, who has served on the Supreme Court since 2006, said, “Mercy should be built into the laws … the authority to make the laws rests with Congress and Congress should build in mercy when it enacts laws.”

“The responsibility of the executive [branch], headed by the president, is to enforce the law,” he continued. “But the enforcement of the law often involves a measure of discretion and someone who has discretion to enforce the law should enforce the law with mercy. Judges have to follow the law. Sometimes the law is framed in a way that allows the judge to exercise mercy,” for example, in criminal sentencing.

“A legal system, of course, is supposed to promote justice, and in human terms, completely reconciling mercy with justice is probably impossible. I think probably only God can do that,” he said.

The audience at Alito’s talk included Vatican officials, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, former prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura and Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts.

Catholic lawyers on pilgrimage to Rome for the Jubilee of Justice were also in attendance for the discussion, held in a chamber of the Cancelleria, a 16th-century building in the center of Rome that is home to the Holy See’s three tribunals: The Apostolic Penitentiary, the Apostolic Signatura, and the Roman Rota.

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Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento, California. / Credit: Randy Miramontez/Shutterstock

Rome Newsroom, Apr 20, 2024 / 07:40 am (CNA).
Pope Francis has named Father Reynaldo Bersabal as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Sacrame… […]