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Pope Francis in 2020: A pandemic year in pictures
Dec 30, 2020 senior correspondent
Pope Francis puts on his face mask as he attends an inter-religious ceremony for peace in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, in Rome Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2020 (Credit: Gregorio Borgia/AP.)
While every year is unique in its own way, 2020 will arguably go down as among the most memorable in recent history, and these pictures attempt to capture the major moments of the past 12 months.
ROME – While every year is unique in its own way, 2020 will arguably go down as among the most memorable in recent history. Some of the most iconic images for perhaps the next century have emerged over the past 12 months, most of which are related to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
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How much longer will the Middle East celebrate Christmas?
The birthplace of Christianity may soon be uninhabitable for its believers without reforms to help them survive. A Palestinian National security unit is deployed in Manger Square, adjacent to the Church of the Nativity, traditionally believed by Christians to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, ahead of Christmas, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Dec. 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
December 24, 2020
(RNS) Days before the start of Advent, mobs in a city 200 miles south along the Nile from Cairo burned Coptic Orthodox Christian homes and ransacked Christian businesses before attacking a church with stones and Molotov cocktails. Why? Because of a Facebook post that allegedly mentioned the Prophet Muhammad and the attackers found offensive.
Although the Christmas story could be said to have begun at any number of points or places, it was Bethlehem that became the stage for the birth of Jesus. Today, Bethlehem is recreated in village halls, school auditoriums, and churches all over the world for the annual ritual of the Nativity play. The imagery of the humble stable, lit up by a star, with the shepherds and wise men converging upon it, is familiar from the greetings cards we send. At Christmas carol concerts we sing “O little town of Bethlehem.” Somehow this often remains disconnected from our imagining of Christmas, which, in the West, is so heavily tied up with traditions formed in the Victorian period in England and in America and so is removed geographically and temporally from Bethlehem at the time of Jesus.