Castro meets Pope

Reuters

10 May, 2015, 18:28

Update: 10 May, 2015, 18:28

Vatican City: Cuban President Raul Castro on Sunday thanked Pope Francis for brokering the thaw between Havana and Washington and said the pope so impressed him that he might return to the Church, despite being a communist.

The 83-year-old younger brother of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel spoke with the pope for nearly an hour - unusually long for a papal meeting - during a visit the Vatican said was strictly private and not a state visit.

Armenian WWI massacre ‘genocide’: Pope

Reuters

12 April, 2015, 16:56

Update: 12 April, 2015, 16:56

Vatican City: Pope Francis on Sunday commemorated the 100th anniversary of the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians as ‘the first genocide of the 20th century’, words that could draw an angry reaction from Turkey.

Muslim Turkey accepts many Christian Armenians died in partisan fighting beginning in 1915, but it denies that hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to ‘genocide’.

During a Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, Francis recalled the ‘senseless slaughter’ of a century ago.