News Briefing: global

Pope Francis patted a tiger from a travelling circus on Thursday last week when the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall hosted a ceremony paying homage to clowns, musicians and other circus workers. The tiger brought a smile to the Pope’s face as it stalked across the marble floor on a leash in front of hundreds of onlookers, and guzzled milk from a bottle.

The Vatican has taken in a further nine Syrian refugees, adding to the 12 that were brought over from Lesbos by Pope Francis in April. These refugees, two of whom are Christians, were brought over to the Italian capital on Thursday last week.  

Shanghai’s most senior Catholic Bishop, Thaddeus Ma Daquin, who has been under house arrest for the past four years, appears to have dramatically retracted his 2012 decision to resign from the state-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA).

In his latest blog, posted on 12 June, Bishop Ma proclaimed his support for the CCPA and asked forgiveness for “mistakes” he made in the recent past.

Bishop Ma has been under house arrest since he publicly renounced his membership of the official Patriotic Church at his ordination in July 2012. Until then, Ma worked with the CCPA and indeed had been the vice-chairman of Shanghai’s Patriotic Association. During his incarceration in Sheshan Seminary he has regularly posted blogs, mostly excerpts from Scripture and greetings to the faithful. Vatican officials have advised “not to make too much of what is written until the circumstances in which it took place are clarified”. Some Catholics believe he blogged under duress; for others, this action is the “price he must pay” to resume his episcopal duties and leadership in Shanghai diocese. The diocese has seen growing control by officials of the Communist Government’s Religious Affairs Bureau and funds moved from its account. The broader context has been a thaw over the past eight months in relations between the Vatican and Beijing, with several high-level meetings.

Brexit plea
A renowned Czech Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian called on the British people to reject Brexit as “the temptation to betray Europe, our common homeland”. The collapse of the European Union would not bring about the “sovereignty of nations”, but instead mounting chaos and the threat of internal conflicts and local wars, wrote Fr Tomas Halik (above) in his open letter addressed to the British people ahead of this week’s EU referendum. Halik won the prestigious Templeton Prize in 2014. In his open letter, he warned against “two dark powers” who wage “an intense propaganda war against Europe, aimed at weakening its unity and undermining the EU” - the Islamic State and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

‘Boat person’ named bishop
Joseph Nguyen, 58, who escaped from Vietnam as a “boat person” and arrived in Canada with almost no English, has this month been named Bishop of the British Columbia Diocese of Kamloops. After being ordained, he worked as a parish priest and then as a prison chaplain, a job that was the mirror opposite of his own time in jails in Vietnam where he was imprisoned for his faith. He told the Vancouver Sun that while in prison “I kept praying, asking God to give me courage and strength. I tried to unite my suffering with the Lord. I still do.” In the early 1980s, Canada took in tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people.

In the United States, bishops last week continued to address the 12 June killing of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando.

In a radio interview, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston renewed his call for a ban on assault weapons. He cited previous mass murders and deplored the “pale response to the horror” that had followed those incidents. He also blogged that the Church stands in solidarity with both the LGBT community and the Muslim community. The mass-murderer, Omar Mateen, who was also killed, declared his allegiance to Islamic State.
Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich seconded O’Malley’s call for stronger gun control laws and restated his solidarity with the LGBT community, expressed on the day of the shooting. “Thirty years ago, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a letter describing as deplorable the fact that some homosexual persons, as they put it, have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action,” Cupich said. “They said [this] deserves condemnation from church pastors whenever it occurs, so I believe it was important to raise my voice in this moment. This is what the Church [has asked] us to do for over 30 years now.”
Archbishop Roberto Gonzalez of San Juan, Puerto Rico, announced that the Mass for the patronal feast of the island, the feast of the birth of St John the Baptist, would be celebrated for the repose of the souls of the victims of the Orlando shooting, many of whom were originally from Puerto Rico.

Queen Rania of Jordan (above), wife of King Abdullah II, on 14 June visited Caritas projects in Amman which are assisting refugees from Syria and Iraq. She was accompanied by Wael Suleiman, director of Caritas Jordan, during her tour of initiatives in the Jabal al-Weibdeh district of Amman. One project is the “Restaurant of Mercy”, inaugurated on Christmas Eve 2015, which offers 500 hot meals each day to those in need. Queen Rania also visited the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation, where she met Archbishop Maroun Lahham, Patriarchal Vicar for Jordan of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Blood donation campaign
A parish in southern Kerala state in India has initiated a campaign to promote blood donation in the Year of Mercy. To mark World Blood Donation Day on 14 June, the Kochupally parish under Neyyattinkara diocese collected blood donation consent forms during the offertory. “More than 100 faithful confirmed their willingness to donate blood on the first day,” parish priest Fr Valsalan Jose said.

Christian leaders in The Philippines have signed a “covenant of partnership”, agreeing to fight human trafficking together. It was signed on 10 June by the Catholic bishops’ conference, the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, and the Philippines Council of Evangelical Churches. The church leaders promised to provide sanctuary, legal support, emergency funds, and medical and psychological support to victims.