England: catholic schools and “excellent citizens”

Catholic schools, “excellent training grounds for good citizens, important places of promotion of social participation”. This was found by a survey of the “Von Hugel Centre for the promotion of faith within society”, an important ecumenical survey centre based in Cambridge which conducted a survey of over 1400 students in nineteen schools in England and […]

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Poland: shopkeepers to compulsory opening on holidays

A day of national strike for keeping shops closed on holidays has been held today, the day of Corpus Domini, in Poland, by the members of the trade section of the trade-union Solidarnosc. The shopkeepers, forced even today, a day that has always been a holiday in Poland, to open their shops, warned their customers […]

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Portugal: culture and evangelization

The 3rd National Days for the Pastoral Care of Tourism were recently held in Fatima. Theme of this year’s event: “The pastoral care of culture: priorities and practical actions”. Father Tolentino Mendonça, director of the National Secretariat, summed up the conclusions of the meeting by explaining that “place, progression and surprise are the three key […]

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Ireland: president remenber Ireland

“It is necessary to ponder over the series of events which pushed so many Iraqi Christian communities to the limit, threatening their survival”. The warning was by the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese. She sent a message during the mass for the soul of Father Ragheed Ganni, the Chaldean priest killed with three subdeacons in […]

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Austria-Croatia: bishops in joint session

For the first time since the independence of Croatia in 1991, the Bishops’ Conferences of Austria and Croatia met in joint session in Zagreb in recent days. A solemn mass was celebrated in Zagreb Cathedral at the end of the assembly. The rite was followed by a procession led by Cardinals Christoph Schönborn and Josip […]

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Spain: end of the ETA truce, “bad news”

“The ETA communiqué announcing the end of the truce is bad news”, declare the bishops of the Basque dioceses of Bilbao, Ricardo Blázquez, President of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, of San Sebastián, Juan María Uriarte, and of Vitoria, Miguel Asurmendi, in response to the recent news of ETA’s unilateral breaking of the ceasefire, which has […]

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EU

Green Week

The aims are manifold: to permit an intensive debate between EU institutions and experts on individual issues of a political, legal, economic, social and environmental nature; to gather information and opinions and compare “good practices”; to involve public opinion, raise its awareness and enable it to participate in specific Community initiatives. These are the objectives […]

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Unemployment falling in the EU none

The statistics office of the European Commission (Eurostat) has published the data relating to unemployment in the European Union for April 2007. In the thirteen countries of the eurozone the rate dropped from 7.2 in March to 7.1% in April; the same figure was registered by the EU as a whole. The lowest unemployment rates […]

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For territorial cooperation

The first pan-European round table on the European Territorial Cooperation Group (ETCG) was held in Brussels on 7 June. ETCG is the new EU regulatory instrument “to facilitate the implementation and effective management of cross-border, trans-national or inter-regional projects” within the Union. The meeting, organized by the Committee of the Regions, was aimed at “evaluating […]

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European GDP growing

In spite of a slight slowdown over the last quarter of 2006, according to the estimates of Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Commission, the European average GDP both of the eurozone and the EU-27 grew by 0.6% in the first three months of this year. The annualised growth of GDP is calculated respectively […]

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