Food crisis warning
Warnings of a looming food crisis in Malawi are coming this month from missionaries in the country and Cafod’s Malawi representative, Verity Johnson. “The month of June will see an unprecedented food crisis,” warned Fr Piergiorgio Gamba, a Montfort missionary. “Barns have been empty for some time, but it took months for the Government to find a response to this situation and only on 12 April did the President declare a state of disaster for the whole country,” said Fr Gamba.
The Catholic Church in Asia has been accused of losing its identity as “church of the poor” by one of India’s most prominent Catholic theologians and the first woman president of the Indian Theological Association. In an address to the eighth Congress of Asian Theologians at Kochi in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Presentation Sister Shalini Mulackal (above) told around 100 theologians that “today the Church is no more the church of the poor, but one can even say it is the church of institutions”. She said the Church is missing the “zeal” of the 1970s and 1980s “to be at the service of the marginalised”. The Church in India, often seen as a refuge for low-caste Dalits, has been accused of “turning a blind eye” to discrimination by higher-caste Indians, including Catholics, against Dalits.
A Norwegian bishop reported that the Catholic Church there has asked the Vatican for permission to stop officiating at civil weddings, citing concerns about “aggressive” politicians, particularly after Norway’s Lutheran Churches voted to conduct same-sex weddings. Bishop Bernt Eidsvig of Oslo (above) said: “Politicians may now get aggressive towards Churches who resist same-sex weddings, so the best option is for us to stop conducting marriages on the state’s behalf.”
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