News Briefing: global

Kidnapped priest’s plea
The Indian Salesian priest who was kidnapped in Yemen in March last year has pleaded for help in a video posted online on 26 December. In it, a visibly frail Fr Tom Uzhunnalil (pictured above before he was seized) blamed both the Indian Government and church officials for failing to secure his release. He claimed his captors had made several contacts with the Indian Government and yet “nothing has been done seriously in my regard”. He suggested that he would have been taken more seriously had he been a European priest. He urged Pope Francis, who appealed for the priest’s release last April, to “please take care of my life; I am very much depressed and my health is deteriorating”. The day following the video’s release, India’s minister of state for parliamentary affairs assured Cardinal George Alencherry, Archbishop of Ernakulam-Angamaly of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, that the Government was “doing everything possible” on behalf of Fr Uzhunnalil, who was abducted on 4 March in Aden, in an attack on a Missionaries of Charity-run retirement home that killed 15 people.

Media silence condemned
The Bishop of Yei in South Sudan has denounced the “deafening silence of the media” and the “indifferent gaze of the international community” in the face of the deteriorating security situation. People were living in fear, Bishop Erkolano Lodu Tombe, said, as military and civilian groups with ties to the Government in Juba target individuals and communities they suspect of supporting the South Sudanese rebel leader, Riek Machar.

Amnesty terms
In accordance with the terms of the Peace Accords reached between the Colombian Government and FARC rebels, the Colombian parliament approved a bill on 28 December that will set the terms of amnesty for members of FARC, which has now officially registered as a political party. The amnesty bill establishes terms for thousands of FARC ex-fighters to begin a re-integration process. Roughly 4,000 FARC members who are currently imprisoned will be able to leave detention to relocate to holding areas. MPs in Poland have voted to declare 2017 the “Year of the Virgin Mary” commemorating her symbolic coronation as Queen of Poland under a parlia­ment­ary act of 1717.

“The coronation ceremony united all classes and was a national manifestation of faith - a reference point for national endeavours in shaping liberty and for hopes of spiritual renewal,” the resolution noted.

The resolution said Poland’s Jasna Gora national sanctuary was the country’s spiritual capital, while its Black Madonna icon (where Pope Francis is pictured praying above) after 600 years remained “one of the most important religious and material national treasures”.


Fulani herdsmen are waging crimes of violence against Christians in Kaduna State, Northern Nigeria, according to Bishop Joseph Bagobiri of Kafanchan. Since September, he said, there have been “53 villages burned down, 808 people murdered and 57 wounded, 1,422 houses and 16 churches destroyed”. The Fulani are Muslim and the targeted villages are mainly Christian.


The head of Russia’s Orthodox Church has urged citizens to “learn lessons” from the upcoming centenary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, rather than staging “inappropriate celebrations”. “While marking this tragedy’s hundredth anniversary, we should also consciously accompany our remembrance with deep reflection and sincere prayer,” said Patriarch Kirill. “We should dedicate the year to considering what happened to our people and what these trials meant, and what spiritual conclusions should be drawn from the tragic history of the twentieth century,” he told the Russian Church’s Supreme Council in Moscow, saying Russians should “avoid the same errors at the current stage of development”.


Dominican Republic bishops said they were “surprised and saddened” after President Danilo Medina vetoed a measure to criminalise the majority of abortions. He vetoed a bill that would have forbidden abortion except when a mother’s life is at risk. The president said he only supported abortion in cases of rape, incest and birth defects.

The German Protestant Churches’ Luther ambassador Margot Kässmann (above), who was appointed Special Envoy for the 2017 Reformation Anniversary Year, celebrated 1 January 2017 as the dawn rose on the north-eastern tip of the Chatham Islands (Rekohu Wharekauri) together with Lutherans from New Zealand and Australia. The international dateline bends eastwards around the islands so that the islanders are the first people to greet each new day. Bishop Mark Whitfield of the New Zealand Lutheran Church visited Berlin before Christmas and invited Kässmann to celebrate the New Year “in the first place to enter the Reformation Anniversary Year”.


The state-run University of Strasbourg has elected a Catholic priest as its next president despite a debate over whether the appointment of Fr Michel Deneken, who headed its Catholic theology faculty before serving as university vice-president for seven years, violated France’s secularist policy of laïcité. The strict secularism in the French public service does not apply to Alsace and Moselle, regions under German control in 1905 when France passed its law separating Church and state. Their public universities still have German-style theology departments, unlike the state-run universities elsewhere in France.


The leading Catholic biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer S.J. died on 24 December in Merion, Pennsylvania aged 96.

Dialogue in question
The Archbishop of the Venezuelan capital Caracas, Jorge Urosa, wrote in a Christmas message that “the dialogue between the Government and the opposition, which was a source of hope for many sectors of the country, is now in question”, writes Martha Pskowski.

A Vatican envoy helped initiate negotiations between the Government of Nicolás Maduro and opposition leaders last autumn, but the talks have been on hold since early December. Urosa said that the situation of the roughly 100 political prisoners from different opposition groups must be addressed.