News Briefing: global

On Saturday last week Pope Francis met Sheikha Moza bint Nasser of Qatar in a 30-minute private audience. Sheikha Moza is president of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. The foundation dispenses billions of dollars annually in educational, scientific, environmental, cultural and medical initiatives.

Advocates for clergy sex-abuse victims are voicing disgust that the New York State Catholic Conference has spent more than $US2.1 million (£1.45m) in lobbying the state legislature since 2009, in an effort to block a legislative proposal that would extend the statute of limitations during which a child victim of sex abuse can file a claim. Under current law, a person must file a claim before they reach the age of 23. “They are willing to spend limitless money in order to basically keep bad guys from being accountable for their actions,” Melanie Blow, chief operations officer for the Stop Abuse Campaign told the New York Daily News. The $US2.1m reported under state transparency laws went to several top-tier lobbying firms in Albany, the state capital. Advocates of the proposal to extend the statute of limitations note that victims sometimes are unable to even discuss their abuse for years afterwards.

The name of convicted Australian paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale has had a black line put through it on an honour board at his former school. John Crowley, headmaster of St Patrick’s College in the Victorian Goldfields city of Ballarat, also placed a plaque beneath the board, which reads: “The black line above stands both as a symbol of respect for the bravery of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and their families and for the College’s deep remorse for the pain and suffering caused by the actions of this individual.” Ridsdale, who has been laicised, has been convicted four times for offences committed against children from the 1960s to the 1980s. Last year, he gave evidence by video link from jail to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Visitor numbers to a pilgrimage site in Taiwan have shot up during the Year of Mercy. The Chinese Martyrs Sanctuary, a parish in New Taipei City and one of five designated pilgrimage sites in the Archdiocese of Taipei with a Holy Door, has so far received more than 70 pilgrimage tours from home and abroad, including many from mainland China. Chinese Martyrs Sanctuary gives mainland pilgrims a rare chance to venerate Chinese martyrs and saints. In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonised 120 men, women and children who gave their lives for their faith in China between 1648 and 1930.


Buti Tlhagale, Archbishop of Johannesburg (above), has called for legislative changes to the Refugee Act that affects migrants and refugees in South Africa. Addressing a meeting of the Department of Pastoral Care for Migrants and Refugees, Archbishop Tlhagale said there were issues of “unfairness, injustice and inhumanity” facing refugees in the country, many of them from Zimbabwe and Democratic Republic of Congo. Delegates complained that migration policies were often implemented in isolation from health and housing needs.

Bishop donates kidney
A bishop in India has donated one of his kidneys to a seriously ill 30-year-old Hindu man. Auxiliary Bishop Jacob Muricken of Palai, a 52-year-old Syro-Malabar Catholic bishop from the southern state of Kerala, underwent surgery on 1 June, and said he was inspired by the Year of Mercy. “It’s a simple sacrifice for a fellow human being,” Bishop Muricken said. He is thought to be the first serving bishop to donate a kidney while alive, and the action could help break down taboos in India against organ donation. The recipient, Sooraj Sudhakaran, had been undergoing dialysis for over a year after kidney failure. A low-caste Hindu, he supports financially his wife and mother. Bishop Muricken took the view that, “if I can save the life of Sudhakaran, a family will be saved”. Sudhakaran responded that, “for me it’s nothing less than God’s intervention”.

Pope Francis has given the go-ahead for a new Vatican department for “laity, family and life” that will have a number of lay people among its senior members of staff. In a long-awaited statement announcing the body, the Holy See said that three lay people from different parts of the world would lead its different sections and it was possible that a lay person would be made the number two to a cardinal.

Kenyan Catholic bishops are expressing deep concern over violent protests that have left at least five people dead. Last month Raila Odinga, leader of the opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD), called weekly protests aimed at overhauling Kenya’s election commission. General elections are due in August next year. On Monday two demonstrators were killed in Kisumu and six were taken to hospital suffering from gunshot wounds, the Red Cross said. Three people died in similar protests in western Kenya on 23 May. The bishops have offered to act as brokers between CORD and the Government.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia, which has approximately 250,000 members, has officially abolished women’s ordination. On 3 June, 201 of the 282 members of the General Synod voted in favour of only allowing men to be ordained. Women were first ordained in the Latvian Lutheran Church in 1975 but no women have been ordained since 1993 when the present conservative Archbishop of Riga, Janis Vanags, was appointed.

Stop persecution plea
UN human rights officials have called on Vietnam’s Govern­ment to stop the persecution of a Christian activist protesting over her husband’s five-year imprisonment for religious activities. Tran Thi Hong (pictured above with two of her children) “has been repeatedly arrested and tortured as retaliation for informing the international community of human rights violations against her husband, who is in prison for peaceful religious activities,” said a statement from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Mrs Hong’s husband, Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh, has been in prison since 2011 for his activities as director of the Vietnam-US Lutheran Alliance Church, which is considered as anti-government and anti-communist by the authorities.