The Venezuelan Opposition held a general strike across the country on 20 July in a last-ditch effort to put pressure on President Nicolás Maduro to cancel elections for a Constituent Assembly, scheduled for July 30.
The 545 representatives of the body would be tasked with drafting a new constitution to entrench Mr Maduro in power. The proposed new body would sit in the chamber of the National Assembly, the only state institution that is nominally controlled by the president’s opponents. The Opposition speaker of the legislature, Julio Borges, has described the proposed Maduro assembly as “a coup against the constitution”. At least two people were killed during the 20 July strike, in which millions of Venezuelans protested and hundreds were arrested. Mr Maduro has insisted that the Assembly will go ahead.
On Friday, the Venezuelan Bishops’ Conference released a statement saying, “As Pastors of the Church in Venezuela, we raise our voice to ask: the Government to withdraw the proposal of the Constituent Assembly; the armed forces to serve the people, not the regime or the ruling party; all politicians, to commit themselves with the population to overcome the crisis.”
Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses have tabled an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg after Russia’s Supreme Court upheld a ban on their “illegal activities”. “The Supreme Court has violated not just the norms of Russian legislation but also international norms,” Viktor Zhenkov, a lawyer for the Witnesses’ Administrative Centre, told Russia’s Interfax news agency. “The provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights were clearly breached in this case, since not a single person has decided to engage in illegal activities or been affected by them.” The lawyer was speaking after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal against its April judgment, branding the Jehovah’s Witnesses an “extremist organisation” and authorising the confiscation of their properties.
Russian police began seizing buildings and other places of worship after the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose 395 branches have around 175,000 members nationwide, were outlawed. Human rights groups, the US, British and German governments, as well as Russia’s small Catholic Church, have all condemned the move.
Callista Gingrich, President Donald Trump’s nominee to become Ambassador to the Holy See, testified at her confirmation hearing in the US Senate last week. Mrs Gingrich, the third wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was asked about the conflicting views of the Pope and the President on climate change. She said she had “looked at some of” Laudato si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment. “President Trump wants to maintain that we have clean air and clean water,” she assured the senators. She was expected to be confirmed by a vote of the full Senate this week.
Fewer Germans leave Church
The rate at which Catholics are leaving the German Church is slowing: 162,093 Catholics left the Church in Germany in 2016, roughly 10 per cent fewer than in 2015 and 25 per cent fewer than in 2014. The number joining remained almost the same – 6,461 in 2016, compared to 6,474 in 2015. The total number of Catholics in Germany is 23,581,549, said bishops’ conference secretary, Fr Hans Langendörfer SJ.
Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio, Texas, issued a statement on Monday expressing horror at the deaths at the weekend of at least nine victims of human smuggling or trafficking.
“There are no words to convey the sadness, despair, and yes, even anger, we feel today at learning of [these] completely senseless deaths,” he said. “We also fervently pray for the recovery of health for about 30 other adults and children who are currently hospitalised, with news reports stating that the majority of those are fighting for their lives with serious injuries.”
The victims were crammed into a sweltering tractor-trailer, found parked outside a Walmart store (above). The driver was arrested. “We’re looking at a human-trafficking crime,” San Antonio police chief William McManus said, calling the event “a horrific tragedy”.
Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Church leaders have cautioned that Catholics could soon be wiped out in the country, after steadily decreasing in number since the bloody 1992-5 war in Bosnia. “A malicious strategy is under way to arouse hatred towards our Church and silence its struggle for justice and peace,” said Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo (pictured), the bishops’ conference president, after a conference plenary in Banja Luka. Catholics, mostly ethnic Croats, made up 15 per cent of the 4.3 million citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina before the 1992-5 war, which cost over 100,000 lives and ended with the formation of autonomous Serbian and Muslim-dominated territories within one state. A 2016 Church report said the Catholic population fell by 14,500 over the previous year.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn said he was “shattered” by the Turkish president’s recent threat to “tear off his enemies’ heads” and “crush” those who are against him. In his weekly column in the free Viennese paper Heute, Cardinal Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, said he was “aghast” at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s public threat, made on the first anniversary of the failed 16 July 2016 coup against him. Cardinal Schönborn called the situation in Turkey “deeply worrying”, with tens of thousands of suspected political opponents in in prison. The cardinal quoted Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali bin Abi Talib, who is recorded as having said that “forgiveness is the best victory.”
25-year Bible translation
About 5,000 central Australian Aboriginal people now have much of the Bible in their own Arrernte language after a translation project that has taken more than 25 years. Divine Word Missionary Fr Prakash Menezes, assistant priest at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Parish in Alice Springs, told Brisbane’s Catholic Leader that completion of the Eastern and Central Arrernte Shorter Bible was celebrated at Mass in Alice Springs on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday earlier this month.
Loading ...
