PARIS (CNS): The Church in France has launched a programme to combat anti-migrant and anti-Muslim attitudes amid reports of tensions among Catholics.
 
“It is to resist the rise of tensions and hostilities within the Christian community that our movements have decided to work” with the French Bishops’ Conference to find ways to “help Christians rise above these fears and face the migrant question calm and dispassionately,” said a June 7 statement on the conference’s website. 
 

LOURDES (CNS): To permit euthanasia would be to “inscribe in the heart of our society the transgression of the civilizing imperative: ‘You shall not kill,’” said a statement from 118 French bishops opposing the country’s drift toward legal euthanasia.
 
At the end of meeting at the Marian shrine of Lourdes, the bishops—an overwhelming majority of the French Bishops’ Conference—declared that euthanasia would damage the sense of fraternity that held their society together.