What's New

  • Nigerian Igbo Catholics: a Christmastime return to home villages is a must
    Posted: May 8, 2020 - 3:11pm

    By about December 20, people who can are expected to return to their home villages to celebrate Christmas, and generally stay there until after New Year.

  • Historical background: Igboland’s rapid journey into a Catholic bastion
    Posted: May 8, 2020 - 11:59am

    Remarkable as the growth of the Church was in its first 50 years, the growth and strengthening of the Church in Igboland over the next 50 years was no less remarkable.

  • Catholic life in Igboland, Nigeria’s Catholic stronghold
    Posted: May 7, 2020 - 4:06pm

    Catholic life in Igboland is exceptionally vibrant and vital, though not without tensions and paradoxes. Catholic practice there embraces the spectrum from traditional Roman Catholic devotions like the Rosary and Eucharistic Adoration to charismatic and Pentecostal forms of dancing devotion—and in some contexts combines all of these at once.

  • Day of the Kings: Celebrating Epiphany in a changing Spain
    Posted: April 29, 2020 - 10:04am

    The most visible, ritualized celebration of the Nativity of Jesus in Spain occurs not on December 25, but on the twelfth day of Christmas, January 6, the feast of Epiphany—the Día de los Reyes Magos, or Feast of the Three Kings.

  • From Jerusalem to Galilee: Holy Week and Easter in Côte d’Ivoire
    Posted: April 9, 2020 - 11:05am

    Holy Week recalls a wide range of emotional experiences, from the jubilation of Palm Sunday to the pain and violence of Good Friday and the hopefulness of new life at Easter, but even so, parishes across Abidjan in their different contexts celebrate them in different ways.

  • Marian celebrations popular throughout Chile
    Posted: February 24, 2020 - 10:12am

    Marian spirituality is especially important in Chile. Major devotions and Marian celebrations take place at sites throughout Chile.

  • Concheros dance in devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe
    Posted: December 2, 2019 - 5:01pm

    Hundreds of dancers, many in feathered headdresses and indigenous-style costume, dance vigorously for hours during the days leading up to the feast, and on the December 12 feast itself, in the vast plaza in front of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  • The Story of the Apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe
    Posted: December 2, 2019 - 4:09pm

    The story of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531 is one that almost any of her devotees can recount by heart.

  • Mexico's celebration for Our Lady of Guadalupe
    Posted: December 2, 2019 - 10:27am

    Some 20 million people a year visit the Basilica of Santa María de Guadalupe, now the most visited Catholic site in the world. Many of the people who journey here report that they have walked for days and camped nearby as well, just to have a short time visiting their Mother.

  • In China, life and death by a river dammed
    Posted: August 21, 2019 - 12:30pm

    Matthew Chitwood, a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs, provides an updated account of Holy Week in Cizhong, China. In the years since we first visited the village, infrastructure development has taken its toll on the farmland and rural character of Cizhong. A dam on the Mekong River provides needed hydropower but displaced a number of communities who are resettling on Cizhong's fertile rice fields and vineyards.

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