“Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a despot whose shooting and shelling of his own people cannot be defended,” wrote the Catholic Register in an editorial earlier this year, “yet he may be the last line of defence for Syria’s Catholics.” The editorial captures the paradox of a country where, despite an escalating civilian death toll,
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 — A deadly militant siege of a Catholic cathedral in Baghdad, Iraq, was a “savage” act of “absurd violence,” Pope Benedict XVI said. The pope urged international and national authorities and all people of good will to work together to end the “heinous episodes of violence […])