Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the U.S., yet the legacy of human bondage extends far beyond American shores. From African complicity in the slave trade to Black slaveholders in early America, and the persistence of slavery in parts of modern Africa, this article explores the often overlooked complexities of a global and ongoing issue.

‘According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past 14 years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria. In addition, approximately 18,000 churches and 2,500 Christian schools have been attacked…’

‘Baptists plan to vote this week on acting to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex unions ten years ago this month. They would be joining Republican lawmakers from nine states after Congressman Josh Schriver introduced the marriage resolution in his home state of Michigan, saying that the Obergefell ruling “is at odds with the sanctity of marriage…”’

‘The story of Cardinal Kung is that of a faithful shepherd—a saintly figure who refused to renounce God and His Church, despite the consequences of a life sentence imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Three months before his arrest in 1955, then-Bishop Kung stood by his clergy and the faithful in China, rejecting numerous offers of safe passage out of the country.’

‘When countries collectively decide to form a permanent institutional body where divisible sovereignty is the norm, like the EU, it attenuates the ability of those states to make decisions regarding the governance of their own economies and other associated policies. In essence, Hungary must realize that so long as it is a member state of the EU, it delegates certain decision-making to it.’

‘As the Catholic Church teaches, man and woman are made for authentic communion with God and each other…An attachment to a machine, or for that matter, even an affectionate pet, no matter how life-like it may be, cannot fulfill this vocation. It risks becoming an effigy or an impersonation of human relationships, diverting us from the true link for which we were created.’

‘The name “Leo” is a name rooted in tradition. The first Pope Leo, St. Leo the Great, who reigned from 440 to 461, was a contemporary of St. Augustine of Hippo and is known for his zeal for the unity of the Church and orthodoxy, as well as his affirmation of the Petrine primacy and the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline.’

President Trump sparked backlash after posting an AI-generated image of himself as the Pope, drawing outrage from Catholic leaders and public figures alike. While some defended the move as harmless, it can be seen as part of a broader decline in respect for the papacy and its spiritual authority.

‘Having chosen to both forgo the traditional papal attire of his predecessors and to take up residence at the Casa Santa Marta—the five star hotel within the Vatican City walls—instead of the papal palace, Francis presented himself as a populist pope—or, as he was characterized after he died, the “people’s pope”—, vowing to drain the swamp of corruption in the Holy See and revolutionize the Church.’

‘There seems to be a disparity in the character of Pilate according to the Gospels and that of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37/38–100 AD). While both portray him as a complex man caught in a difficult role in difficult times, Josephus stipulates that he was cruel, disrespectful…The Gospels paint a different picture of the Roman governor, being a fair judge, to name an attribute.’

‘President Donald Trump, on his self-proclaimed “liberation day”, imposed sweeping tariffs of at least 10 per cent on almost every product that enters the U.S. from almost every country…with the aim of keeping jobs within the American homeland. What the president has done is reverting to the American “protectionism” of the 19th century, which economists call the Hamiltonian Statecraft.’

‘The UN, unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is a collective security system; the latter is an alliance, which deals with a specific and specified threat and has military forces to address these threats. The UN is juridically neutral, and it is coerced to wait for a threat to emerge before it can consider action.’

‘Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation…34 years ago, on this day, was the death of a Catholic churchman who not only helped build Christendom in the then French-speaking part of Africa, but who was also an apostle against modernism and a champion for traditional Catholicism, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.’

‘Christians are believed to have constituted about 30 per cent of the Syrian population in the 1920s. Before the Syrian civil war, they made up about 10 per cent of Syria’s people, a figure now diminished to about 2.5 per cent, falling from 1.5 million in 2012 to about 300,000 in 2022. Most Christians left for Lebanon, Europe and North America, escaping the war and Syria’s economic straits.’

‘President Donald Trump carried out his promise to impose 25 per cent tariffs with no clear rationale on America’s two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico. They were first due to take effect last month but then both countries were offered a last-minute reprieve.’

‘It is true that it seemed as if both Trump and Vance berated Zelenskyy as if he were a child who refused to do his homework, saying that he was not grateful enough for U.S. aid. And I do not wish to exonerate their behavior, either, but one has to place things into context: it was Zelenskyy who sparked the fire.’

‘Why then would the U.S. now wish to abandon to uphold and defend the sovereign rights of a free country? Quite simply, because the Ukrainians do not have the manpower anymore to fend off Russian forces, let alone the political clout to regain its lost territories, including Crimea, regardless of European support.’

‘The criminality in all this is that Zelenskyy and the U.S.-led West know that the Ukrainians are not going to win on the battlefield, and that Ukraine has effectively become an economic and politically dysfunctional rump state. Yet both want the war to continue, whether for lucrative reasons or not.’

‘Trump’s actions, like them or not, can be seen as an application of a highly contested “unitary executive theory”—an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House. Trump’s measures, however, reflect the constitutional philosophy of the Founding Father who effectively created the American system, Alexander Hamilton.’

‘The truth of the matter is that the Chinese will not allow themselves to be entrapped by Western and non-Western foreigners alike as they did during the “Century of Humiliation”. Xi is determined more than ever to have China emerge as the greatest power on earth, thus seeing the U.S. not as a partner but as an adversary that is equally determined to do everything it can to ensure he fails.’

‘Under the Mosaic legislation, any woman after bringing a son into the world was considered unclear for seven days; she had to wait for another 33 days before presenting herself in the temple. This so-called spiritual impurity refers to a certain distance from the source of life: God Himself, for she is no longer part of the singular act of creation, the conception of a child.’

U.S.-led Western society has been tainted by the LGTBQ+ policies to the point of redefining the institution the family. It was, thus, reassuring to hear the president say: ‘As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.’

‘Hamas may leverage the prisoner releases to come to power. It has hammered out, to its own liking, a deal to take place over many months so as to build up enough strength to take control of the West Bank. This is similar to the deal the U.S. made with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, infamously known as the Taliban on 29 February 2020, in Doha, Qatar, by the first Trump administration.’

‘Like most U.S. presidents, Nixon had controversial policies, as with the secret bombing of  Laos and Cambodia, which coerced the North Vietnamese to the aforementioned peace accords. All things being equal, perhaps history will one day remember him as the man who paved the way, if not fomented, for nations to consider speaking with each other, as opposed to shooting at each other.’

‘While the world is justly concerned about the acts of jihadist violence, it has been led by neoconservative and progressive politicians and the mainstream media to believe that the acts of terror carried out by Muslims are sparse and provincial. Consequential to this has been the denial of the jihadist doctrine as a juridical development of Islamic sacred texts.’

‘Lucifer certainly did not want to be God, for he was intelligent enough to know that he was not of the same substance of our Creator, but he wanted to be or rule like God. Envious of God, he thus submitted to his pride and rebelled against the Almighty—a temptation that at times can be appealing during our worst moments.’

‘In 1914, a simple chanting of a Christmas carol brought bitter enemies together, as if they had always been united. In a sense, they were united through Christ, Who made them see each that they could live in harmony. Could that happen today?’

‘The teaching that Mary, the Mother of Christ, was from the very moment of her conception preserved from original sin, was first explained by the Scottish Franciscan friar Duns Scotus (1266-1308). He explained that with Mary conception and redemption were simultaneous, producing a two-fold status at the first moment of her existence.’

‘Last year, Pope Francis met separately with relatives of Israeli hostages in Gaza and Palestinians living through the war. His use of terminology such as “terrorism”, and, according to the Palestinians, “genocide”, set off a firestorm. In any case, the Pontiff now says in his book: “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”’

‘Aside from a rare or every-now-and-then post, hardly anyone in the mainstream media—this goes for our politicians too—speaks to us about the Christian genocide in Nigeria at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. While Western politicians and certain of our own Catholic hierarchy are reticent, to say the least, to publicly speak about this—such silence is not only scandalous but inadvertently contributes to the persecution—our Catholic brothers and sisters are being slaughtered.’