Cardinal lambasts government
The head of Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church is calling for the country’s government to resign over what he says is its failure to investigate effectively an “international conspiracy” behind the deadly Easter bombings this year.
Speaking at the reconsecration of one of the bombed churches last Sunday, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, said the authorities had failed to identify those behind the suicide bombings that killed at least 258 people at three churches and three hotels in Sri Lanka on 21 April.
“The executive and the legislature were locked in a power struggle,” the cardinal said. “The selfish power-hungry leaders did not … heed intelligence warnings.” Ranjith said he had no faith in existing inquiries. Bishop J.D. Anthony Jayakody, auxiliary of Colombo, called last week for an independent commission to investigate the bombings.
Nine hundred religious leaders joined diplomats at the US State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom last week. The two-day meeting looked at ways to promote religious liberty abroad and included an address by Vice President Mike Pence. He announced that the US had put sanctions on two Iranian- backed militia leaders that he said had “terrorised the people of the Nineveh Plain” in Iraq.
President Donald Trump met some two dozen survivors of religious violence in the Oval Office on Wednesday and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the formation of a new International Religious Freedom Alliance.
Priest and nun face murder trial
A trial is scheduled to start on 5 August of a Catholic priest and a nun accused of murdering another nun 27 years ago at a convent in Kerala in India. The prosecution claims the priest, Fr Thomas Kottoor, and another priest, Fr Jose Poothirkkayil, who was acquitted of the murder charge last year, maintained illicit relations with the third murder suspect, Sr Sephy.
It is alleged that in the early hours of 27 March 1992, a 19-year-old aspirant nun, Sr Abhaya, saw the two priests and Sr Sephy in the kitchen in a “compromising position”.
Investigators allege that the three then attacked St Abhaya with an axe to kill her in an attempt to hide their illicit sexual activity, and then dumped her body in a well to make it look like a suicide.
The President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, Archbishop Romulo Valles of Davao, has said sedition charges made against four bishops, three priests and several government critics are “beyond belief”.
Police last week filed charges of inciting sedition, cyber libel, libel and obstruction of justice
against more than 40 people, including the country’s vice president. The charges stem from a video on social media earlier this year linking the family of President Rodrigo Duterte to the illegal drugs trade.
Poland’s bishops’ conference has condemned violent assaults on a weekend gay rights rally by nationalists who claimed to be defending their Catholic cathedral, while also insisting that the Church will continue to speak out against the “deadly sin” of homosexuality.
It was reacting to an Equality Parade by several hundred LGBT campaigners in the eastern city of Bialystok, which a larger group of right-wing counter-protesters disrupted, forcing police to use tear gas and baton charges.
Plot to kill Hitler remembered
Church and state leaders in Germany have commemorated Operation Valkyrie, the July 1944 bomb plot led by Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, which narrowly failed to kill Adolf Hitler. (A memorial stone to the plotters in Berlin is pictured.)
“We must be grateful to these people of 20 July,” said Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne. “During the darkest chapter of German history 75 years ago, they cast a ray of light and gave courage to others by bravely following the voice of conscience.”
The cardinal published his message during weekend commemorations of the failed plot, masterminded by the aristocratic army officer von Stauffenberg with Generals Friedrich Olbricht and Ludwig Beck, in which a bomb was planted in the bunker briefing room of Hitler’s Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. .
The Vatican has restated its full recognition of Spain’s sovereignty after its outgoing nuncio provoked diplomatic protests by criticising the plans of the Socialist government to rebury the former dictator Francisco Franco.
“The Holy See’s position on Franco’s exhumation is clear – it is based on full respect for the sovereignty of the Spanish state and its legal system,” said Alessandro Gisotti, the Vatican’s press office director.
The Bishop of Pemba, in Mozambique, has written a letter criticising the response of the government to a wave of attacks in Cabo Delgado that have killed more than 200 people over the past 18 months.
“What are the civil and military authorities hoping to gain through this atmosphere of secrecy and silence? What is the secret they do not want revealed?” asked Bishop Luiz Fernando Lisboa, whose diocese covers the region hardest hit by the attacks.
“For a year-and-a-half we’ve been subject to this atmosphere in which it is difficult to speak to the people of ‘hope, peace and reconciliation’, as we prepare to welcome the Holy Father with this motto. As long as the people are being instrumentalised by hidden powers, which aim to impose their own interests, there will be no peace or reconciliation, let alone hope,” he said.
Bishop Kevin Vann of Orange, California, dedicated Christ Cathedral as the new mother church of the fast-growing diocese in southern California.
The 78,000 sq ft cathedral was originally built to house televangelist Robert Schuller and his “Hour of Power” TV programmes in 1980. Designed by Philip Johnson and the largest all-glass building in the world when it was built, the Diocese of Orange purchased the building and adjoining campus in 2012 after Schuller Ministries went bankrupt. The landmark building, just down the road from Disneyland, underwent a $70-million renovation, to reconfigure the space for Catholic worship.
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