Croatia hit by 6.4 magnitude earthquake, leaving at least 7 dead

By Jan Bantic, Arnaud Siad and Nada Bashir, CNN

Updated 0142 GMT (0942 HKT) December 30, 2020

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/29/europe/croatia-earthquake-6-3-magnitude-petrinja-intl/index.html

NOW PLAYINGFootage shows aftermath of powerful earthquake in CroatiaCNN00:13/01:12

Source: CNNFootage shows aftermath of powerful earthquake in Croatia 01:12

Zagreb, Croatia (CNN)At least seven people were killed and dozens were injured after a powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck central Croatia on Tuesday, according to the US Geological Survey and Croatian officials.Emergency crews, assisted by the military, were still digging through the rubble in several towns as night fell and electricity remained out.The quake, which struck just after noon local time about 30 miles southeast of the capital Zagreb, could be felt across the Balkans. It is the largest quake to hit Croatia this year, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre.A building destroyed in the earthquake in Petrinja.Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said the death toll was expected to rise. And he appealed to private citizens not to go to the worst-hit town, Petrinja, which was near the epicenter.”At this moment, we don’t know exactly how many people have died. The latest information before the core cabinet meeting was seven people,” Plenkovic said. “We have some indication that this number may be higher, so we’ll wait and see for the police’s official report.”A girl in the town of Petrinja, a man found inside a collapsed church in the village of Žažina, and five men in the village of Majske Poljane, were among the dead, according to Croatia’s Interior Ministry and local media reports.”We are doing everything we can to help the citizens of Petrinja and surrounding areas in this dramatic and tragic situation,” Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said in a tweet.”The destructive earthquake has taken human lives, destroyed homes, and we deeply sympathise with every person and every family that has been harmed.”

Instead of feast day and New Year’s greetings

Let’s become aware of them and let’s come closer to them at least for a moment; them who are deprived of their rights, distrained upon, discriminated against, also the so-called different, victims of extremism, aggression, unscrupulousness, intolerance, the so-called coloured, poor, homeless, refugees, hungry, displaced and victims of falsified religious teachings, children and women victims of religious and other types of violence – exploited children and women who live in captivity – as slaves, ill people suffering pain in any degree of intensity!

10 Grisly Papal Deaths

HISTORY / CHRISTOPHER KLEIN

From crucifixion to suffocation, poisoning to beheading and stoning to starvation, check out 10 particularly gruesome deaths suffered by popes in the early history of the Catholic Church.

‘It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’ Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out

The crisis over sexuality in the Catholic Church goes beyond abuse. It goes to the heart of the priesthood, into a closet that is trapping thousands of men.

The New York Times

By Elizabeth Dias

Photographs by Gabriella Demczuk, Feb. 17, 2019

MILWAUKEE — Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. It was 1982 and he was on a retreat with his classmates from St. Lawrence, a Roman Catholic seminary for teenage boys training to become priests. Leaders asked each boy to rank which he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplegic or gay.

Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word “gay.” They called the game the Game of Life.

The lesson stuck. Seven years later, he climbed up into his seminary dorm window and dangled one leg over the edge. “I really am gay,” Father Greiten, now a priest near Milwaukee, remembered telling himself for the first time. “It was like a death sentence.”

POLAND STRUGGLES TO DEAL WITH PEDOPHILIA IN CATHOLIC CHURCH

REPORTING DEMOCRACY

Claudia Ciobanu, August 26, 2020

Priests share the fire (symbol of Holy Spirit) during the first Polish penitential mass for the sins of pedophilia, at the Catholic Church in Krakow, Poland, 20 June 2014. EPA/STANISLAW ROZPEDZIK

While the Polish authorities focus on fighting an imagined threat to children from what they call the “LGBT lobby”, progress on combating pedophilia inside the Catholic Church, a well-documented phenomenon, remains slow.

Afew days after receiving her first communion in May last year, nine-year-old Julia told her mother she was sick and refused to go to church for further ceremonies planned in relation to this key moment in a Catholic family’s life.

“When I asked her why she didn’t want to go, she said she didn’t like the priest. When I asked her why, she said the priest was touching her,” Magda, Julia’s mother, told BIRN, speaking on the phone from Ruszow, a village of about 2,000 people in south-west Poland where the family lives.

List of Important Events for the Witch Hunts, by Brian A. Pavlac Ph.D., Professor of History

This list includes a selection of events, people, books and more directly and indirectly related to the Witch Hunts.  Some descriptions have links to online secondary and primary sources (as noted) and/or note is taken of those primary sources in Kors & Peters.  For a chronological and geographical ordering, go to the Witch Hunt Timeline.  Here, they are grouped according to the following categories:  

The Horrors of the Church and Its Holy Inquisition

CHURCH AND STATE

This piece was originally published at Biblioteca Pleyades.

“Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with Church dogma must be burned without pity.”
– Pope Innocent III

The Inquisition was an ecclesiastical court and process of the Roman Catholic Church setup for the purpose towards the discovery and punishment of heresy which wielded immense power and brutality in medieval and early modern times. The Inquisitions function was principally assembled to repress all heretics of rights, depriving them of their estate and assets which became subject to the ownership of the Catholic treasury, with each relentlessly sought to destroy anyone who spoke, or even thought differently to the Catholic Church. This system for close to over six centuries became the legal framework throughout most of Europe that orchestrated one of the most confound religious orders in the course of mankind.