Posted on 11/6/2024 09:17 AM ()
Vatican News speaks to the coordinator of ‘Uniservitate’, which promotes service-learning in Catholic Higher Education, and is organising an upcoming 2-day conference in Rome.
Posted on 11/6/2024 08:44 AM ()
The British Embassy to the Holy See and the Jesuit Refugee Service host a symposium on tackling conflict-related sexual violence through faith-based education.
Posted on 11/6/2024 08:35 AM ()
Sister Nikolin Padjo, a missionary religious sister serving in Indonesia, was among those killed after the Lewotobi Laki-laki volcano erupted unexpectedly in the early hours of November 3 in Flores.
Posted on 11/6/2024 06:10 AM ()
In a telegram addressed to Serbian President Aleksander Vučić, Pope Francis says he is praying for victims of an accident at a train station that left 14 people dead.
Posted on 11/6/2024 06:03 AM ()
American voters have reportedly elected Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States, while residents of 10 states were given the choice to restrict or expand access to abortion.
Posted on 11/6/2024 04:57 AM (CNA Daily News)
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 5, 2024 / 23:57 pm (CNA).
The Catholic vote on Tuesday broke for former President Donald Trump by a large margin nationwide and within swing states in the 2024 presidential election, according to exit polls published by the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and NBC News.
According to the Washington Post’s exit poll, Trump won the national Catholic vote by a 15-point margin: 56% to 41%. This shows a much larger victory for Trump among Catholic voters than the Post’s 2020 exit polls, which showed Trump with only a five-point lead above President Joe Biden, 52% to 47%.
The shift represents a 10-point swing in favor of Trump from 2020 to 2024.
The Washington Post poll also found that 69% of voters who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases voted for Harris, but Trump managed to win 28% of voters who held the same view.
Trump also won 90% of voters who believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases and Harris won 9% of voters who held that view.
An exit poll from the Associated Press VoteCast showed Trump leading among Catholic voters but by a smaller seven-point margin than the Post’s poll. According to the poll, Trump won the Catholic vote with about 52% compared with Harris’ 45%.
However, the poll also found that 46% of Catholic voters trusted Harris more on abortion policy, while only 36% trusted Trump more on that issue. About 10% trusted neither and 6% trusted both.
According to the poll, 61% of Catholic voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases and only 38% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. It found that Catholic voters were evenly split on the question of whether abortion should be illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with 49% favoring such a law and 49% opposing it.
The poll found that Catholic voters trusted Trump more than Harris on immigration by a massive 25-point margin, 57% to 32%. It also found that Catholics trusted Trump more on the economy by a 19-point margin, 55% to 36%.
According to the poll, 59% of Catholics were concerned that Harris was too extreme and 58% felt the same way about Trump. About 73% of Catholic voters said they were primarily voting to support their candidate, but 27% of Catholic voters said they were primarily voting to oppose the other candidate.
This shows Trump heavily outperforming earlier polls of Catholics. A poll conducted by Pew in September only showed the former president with a five-point lead over the vice president, beating her 52% compared with 47%.
Catholic voters in 10 key swing states polled by NBC voted for Trump by a 15-point margin, with 56% of the vote going to the former president and only 41% going to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s lead was slightly larger among white Catholic voters with 60% supporting the former president and 37% backing Harris.
According to the poll, Catholics accounted for 22% of the voters in those states and white Catholics accounted for 15% of the voters.
The states included in the NBC poll were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Both Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, courted the Catholic vote heavily in the last few weeks of the election. In late October, Trump called Harris “destructive to Christianity” and said Catholics are “treated worse than anybody.” In that same week, Vance published an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, accusing Harris of “prejudice against Catholics.”
The race had yet to be called as of midnight on Tuesday, but the New York Times live forecast estimated that Trump has more than a 90% chance of winning the election.
Posted on 11/6/2024 03:00 AM ()
During his General Audience, Pope Francis entrusts all those suffering from the tragic storms throughout Spain, and especially in Valencia, to Our Lady of the Forsaken and also remembers all those suffering the brutality of war.
Posted on 11/6/2024 03:00 AM ()
During his weekly General Audience in St. Peter's Square, Pope Francis continues his reflections on the Holy Spirit and marvels how the Spirit operates in our prayer.
Posted on 11/6/2024 01:50 AM (CNA Daily News)
CNA Staff, Nov 5, 2024 / 20:50 pm (CNA).
A proposed pro-abortion amendment in Florida failed to pass on Tuesday, bringing an end to an effort to enshrine broad abortion access in the state constitution and serving abortion advocates with a major defeat in the 2024 election.
The failure of Amendment 4 offers a sharp rebuke to the pro-abortion lobby, which poured more than $100 million into Florida in an effort to enshrine abortion in the state constitution and negate the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act, one of the most pro-life laws in the country.
Prior to the Tuesday vote there were indications that the measure might fail. Less than a week before Election Day, polling indicated that support for the ballot measure was just short of the requisite 60% it needed to pass.
By 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, with roughly 90% of the vote counted, returns showed Amendment 4 with about 57% of voters in favor, failing to clear the 60% threshold.
“Amendment 4 has failed,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said on X on Tuesday night.
With polls now closed in Florida —
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) November 6, 2024
Amendment 3 has failed.
Amendment 4 has failed.
One of 10 states with abortion on the ballot in 2024, the Florida contest was watched closely as a possible bellwether for the abortion fight in the U.S. The measure was vocally opposed by both DeSantis and the Catholic Church in Florida.
On Tuesday night, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops said it was “profoundly relieved at the defeat of Florida’s pro-abortion Amendment 4.”
“This is a positive outcome for Florida and all efforts to promote the flourishing of our state,” the bishops said.
The bishops noted that though the amendment failed, “a majority of Floridians voting in the general election supported it.”
“While significant gains to protect women and preborn children in recent years will remain in place, abortion in Florida will continue at a very high rate under our current laws,” they said.
“Much work remains to open hearts and minds to the dignity and goodness of life in the womb and at every stage,” the bishops continued. “We will continue to proclaim in our churches and in the public square the value of every human life and to highlight that there is a better way forward for women, families, and society than abortion.”
If passed, the Florida rule would have established abortion access through all nine months of pregnancy.
It directed that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health.”
It offered no guidelines in determining a patient’s “health,” rather leaving that assessment up to “the patient’s health care provider.”
Posted on 11/6/2024 01:00 AM ()
Pope Francis writes the introduction for his new book entitled “Faith Is A Journey,” released by the Vatican Publishing House (LEV) on November 6, which contains excerpts of several speeches by the Pope about the theological virtue of faith.