News Briefing: The Church in the World

President’s apology ‘powerful’
The Bishop of Temuco, Chile, Hector Vargas, has called the recent apology that President Michelle Bachelet sent to the Mapuche people a “powerful” statement for the region. On 23 June, Ms Bachelet asked the Mapuche people to forgive the “errors and horrors” committed by the Chilean Government.

The Mapuche indigenous people resisted Spanish conquest for centuries before military defeats pushed them into the Araucanía region in southern Chile, of which Temuco is the capital. The remaining 700,000 Mapuche have higher rates of poverty than the general population and limited access to education. In recent years, a radical faction has adopted the tactics of burning homes, churches and trucks to bring attention to their plight. In 2016 alone, Mapuche activists burned 14 Catholic churches in Araucaní. Bishop Vargas was named the facilitator of the Presidential Advisory Commission for Araucanía in July 2016 and the work of the Commission was presented on 23 June. The proposals include a plan to make the language of the Mapuche people, Mapuzungun, an official language of the region, and another to modify water and land laws in consideration of Mapuche customs.

Temuco is one of the three cities on the itinerary for Pope Francis’ visit to Chile and Peru in January 2018.

Tanker blast kills
150 At least 150 people were killed as they rushed to collect leaking fuel after an oil tanker overturned and exploded in Pakistan. Another 140 people were injured, 40 of them seriously, according to Mohammad Baqar, an official with the local rescue services. The tanker was driving from the southern port city of Karachi to Lahore when the driver lost control and crashed. The disaster came on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Speaking last week, Archbishop Sebastian Shaw of Lahore reflected that “we lived an interreligious peace campaign during Ramadan, where we planted olive trees in front of Christian churches, mosques, madrassas, Catholic schools and Islamic institutes”. Tensions rose in early June when a Christian sanitary worker, Irfan Masih, died in the Sindh region after a Muslim doctor refused to treat him following an accident, saying he was “impure” because he was covered in sewage sludge. At an Iftar dinner in a Lahore church, Archbishop Shaw said: “In the name of our brother Irfan Masih, we invite all religious communities to gather in the name of common humanity.”

Archbishop beatified
Lithuania’s Catholic Church has gained its first beatified communist-era martyr in the only such ceremony ever conducted in the formerly Soviet-ruled Baltic country. “The hostility of the Nazis and communists had no rational justification – it was motivated solely by hatred for Christ’s Gospel and the Church,” said Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. The Italian cardinal was preaching at the beatification of Archbishop Teofilius Matulionis (1873-1962), conducted in various languages on Sunday before 30,000 people in Cathedral Square, Vilnius. He said the sufferings of Matulionis, who was murdered with a lethal injection to stop him from attending the 1962-5 Second Vatican Council, had lasted through many years of “cruel dictatorship”. Speaking at Sunday’s Mass, which Cardinal Vincent Nichols and bishops from around Europe attended, President Dalia Grybauskaite said she hoped that the martyr would “watch over his homeland”. The president of Lithuania’s bishops’ conference, Archbishop Gintaras Grusas of Vilnius, told The Tablet that the witness of communist-era martyrs had lessons to teach, when “lighter forms of persecution” in contemporary Western society still required “daily courage”.


The Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is to hold talks with President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Orthodox Patriarch, Kirill I, during a visit in August to Moscow, where over a million citizens have braved two-mile queues to see the relics of St Nicholas since they were loaned in May by a Catholic basilica in Bari, Italy. Cardinal Parolin’s visit, confirmed by Orthodox officials, will follow the Pope’s historic February 2016 meeting with Patriarch Kirill in Cuba.


Pope Francis has appointed Professor Joachim von Braun as the new President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is currently Professor of Economics and Technological Change at the University of Bonn. He told Vatican Radio that his goal as head of the Academy would be to seek solutions for global inequality and the destruction of the environment.


Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, issued a decree last week that bars people in same-sex marriages from a Christian burial. “Unless they have given a sign of repentance before death, deceased persons who had lived openly in a same-sex marriage giving public scandal to the faithful are to be deprived of ecclesiastical funeral rites,” the decree said. No other US bishops have taken this stand.

Benedict ‘homesick’
Asked in an interview by the German Focus Magazin whether he was homesick, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI replied: “Yes, I am – but it is also very beautiful here in the Vatican”.

He had stopped playing the piano, the 90-year old Pope Emeritus told his interviewer on a walk through the Vatican Gardens. “My fingers no longer obey me – and neither completely does my head,” he explained. Referring to Benedict’s fragile state of health towards the end of his pontificate, Archbishop Georg Gänswein (pictured), his private secretary, told Focus Magazin: “I think that if Pope Benedict had remained Pope, he wouldn’t have lived much longer.”


Retired Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco, who led the archdiocese for 18 years, died on 22 June. He was 88. Archbishop Quinn gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1996 calling for major reform of the Roman Curia. A 1999 book, The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity, grew out of the lecture and won first place in the Catholic Press Association’s 2000 book awards, but was reportedly received coolly at the Vatican.