News Briefing: Church in the World

The German bishops’ conference issued guidelines for dealing with lay Catholics active both in Church roles and in far-right political parties, after months in which dioceses were unsure how to approach them. 

The bishops’ paper published in February titled “Racial Nationalism and Christianity are incompatible” did not state clearly whether dioceses should dismiss parishioners from Church positions if they belonged to the growing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

With its extensive social services and generous official funding, the Church is one of Germany’s largest employers and has a larger place in public life than Churches in neighbouring countries.

The new guidance, which is not obligatory, said anyone openly challenging fundamental Catholic positions – such as teaching on human dignity or welcoming strangers – should be removed from any public role in the Church.

The AfD opposes growing immigration from poorer countries close to Europe. Its main candidate in a recent state election in Brandenburg said Christian charity was reserved to fellow Germans. 

On 29 September, in neighbouring Austria, where bishops do not comment on politics, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) won national elections for the first time. Two more moderate parties came a close second and third, so were expected to seek a coalition to block the FPÖ from forming a government.

Bishop Felix Gmür of Basel, the president of the Swiss bishops’ conference, said the latest suicide method offered to euthanasia patients was dangers because it did not require any medical judgment before users ended their lives. 

The device – called “Sarco” for sarcophagus – features a 3D-printed airtight coffin which a patient enters, closes and then breathes in nitrogen quickly inducing death. The capsule has an optional window and a detachable stand to hold it at an angle. Designers said was made to look like a spaceship to give the feel of traveling beyond life. 

“Unlike other assisted suicide organisations, a medical assessment is not required. This makes suicide too easy to access,” Bishop Gmür said.

Swiss law only prosecutes people who help to induce death for selfish motives, meaning provision of assisted suicide by non-profit organisations has been legal for decades. Most cases involve doctors who make lethal drugs available to be taken by the patient.

Education authorities in Bordeaux suspended the principal of a prominent local Catholic school for three years for breaking laïcité rules governing France’s state subsidies to private schools. 

Christian Espeso, the principal of the Immaculate Conception School in the southwestern city of Pau was accused of making catechism obligatory and inviting the conservative Bishop Marc Aillet of Bayonne to speak with students. Espeso denied placing excessive emphasis on religion, saying it was normal for a bishop to speak at a Catholic school. 

The decision came amid wider examinations of religious schools by education authorities, which provide a large part of private schools’ budgets for the teaching of secular subjects such as French or mathematics. 

Early this year, the Parisian authorities provisionally stopped its subsidies to a prominent Catholic school while France’s only approved Muslim secondary school, in Lille, also lost its public payments. Both were accused of violating laïcité restrictions placed on religious instruction in schools that receive public funds.

The Archdiocese of Paris hosted the Sant’Egidio Community’s International Meetings for Peace on 22-24 September.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was among the 150 leaders from different confessional and religious traditions present, and addressed the opening assembly on reconciliation, which he called “the transformation of destructive conflict into creative rivalry underpinned by mutual acceptance and love”. 

A message from Pope Francis urged participants to use religion to foster “universal fraternity” rather than conflict. “We must keep religions from giving in to the temptation to become a means of fuelling forms of nationalism, ethnocentrism and populism,” he said. 

“In a world at risk of being fragmented by conflicts and wars, the efforts made by believers are invaluable for holding out visions of peace and fostering fraternity and peace among peoples everywhere.”

Pope Francis appointed 28 consultors to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) on 23 September, to advise its leadership and permanent members. 

Most of the appointees were Italian clergy, including the theologian Fr Maurizio Chiodi who has questioned Church teaching on sexual ethics, while seven of the eight lay appointees were women (including two religious sisters). 

On 27 September, the prefect of the DDF Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández consecrated Mgr John Kennedy and Mgr Philippe Curbelié as archbishops within the dicastery, where they are respectively a secretary and an undersecretary. 

In his homily, Cardinal Fernández noted that some people still talk of “the strength of the Church or its power”, even at a time when “we perceive our fragility and limits more than ever before”. 

He told them their service was a gift “entirely oriented towards the good of the people of God” and their episcopal ordination “an alliance of love, with which you strengthen more than ever your bonds with the entire Church”.

The Pope elevated the apostolic administration of Estonia to diocesan status, 100 years after its establishment by Pius XI. Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the apostolic nuncio to the Baltic States, announced the elevation on 26 September, congratulating the administrator Bishop Philippe Jean-Charles Jourdan on becoming first bishop of the new Diocese of Tallinn. Estonia’s most recent census recorded that around 0.78 per cent of the population was Catholic.

Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama announced the creation of a separate micro-state, modelled on the Vatican City, for his country’s Islamic Bektashi community.  

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September, Rama said the new state would be called the “Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order”, to be located on 10 hectares in the capital Tirana, the location of the current “Bektashi World Centre”. 

Although his announcement did not include details of its administration, Rama said this newest and smallest state in the world would follow the example of the Vatican. “Our inspiration is to support the transformation of the Bektashi World Centre in Tirana into a sovereign state, a new centre of moderation, tolerance and peaceful coexistence,” he explained. 

In the last census, over 100,000 Albanians were reported to be members of the Bektashi movement, a branch of Shi’ite Islam in the moderate Sufi tradition that has existed in Albania since the 1930s. 

The Albanian Bekteshi order endorsed the proposal for an independent state, which will be headed by its leader Baba Mondi. “The sovereignty of the Bektashi order is a significant step in strengthening the values of inclusivity, religious harmony, and dialogue in an increasingly divided world,” it said in a statement.

A Spanish microbiologist has begun using bacteria to clean church frescoes.

Pilar Bosch stumbled on the method in a research paper from Italy while her mother, the art restorer Pilar Roig, was struggling to remove glue applied in the 1960s from eighteenth-century paintings by Antonio Palomino in a church in Valencia.  

Bosch discovered that bacteria would degrade the glue if mixed with a natural algae-based gel and subsequently spread on the paintings. Three hours later, the gel is removed, having dissolved the glue.  

“In the past, we used to work in a horrible manual way, with warm water and sponges that took hours and damaged the painting,” Roig said.  

Her daughter has used the method to clean art in Pisa, Monte Cassino and Santiago de Compostela. Now, mother and daughter are working together on a €4 million project to apply their technique to art works in Valencia.

A Catholic bishop in Kenya has called for stronger road safety measures to reduce the hundreds of deaths in road accidents each year, after warnings from the national Automobile Association.

“Each year millions of people are affected by road accidents, resulting in pain, grief and irreparable loss. Sadly this year the numbers continue to rise,” said Archbishop Philip Subira of Nairobi. “Together we can advocate for change towards reducing lives lost on our roads.”

The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) at the Malawi bishops’ conference urged voters to overcome the apathy which has reduced turnout in recent elections. 

There has been widespread disaffection with the ruling Malawi Congress Party since it came to power in 2020 touting Christian credentials and promising to improve livelihoods, with Church agencies reporting little effective change in the past four years. 

“Malawi continues to grapple with voter apathy,” the CCJP said in a statement. “Malawians have the power to shape their country’s leadership and governance. We urge all citizens to engage actively in the electoral process, starting with voter registration. By doing so, we can safeguard rights, strengthen our democracy, and shape the future of our nation.”

Political observers warned that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for the United States presidency may be faltering in the swing state of Pennsylvania, because of her aggressive defence of abortion rights.  

The north-eastern part of the state, including Scranton where President Joe Biden was born, is one of the most heavily Catholic regions in the country.

In the 2020 election Biden carried Lackawanna County, where Scranton is the largest city, by 53.6 per cent to Donald Trump’s 45.2 per cent, going on to win Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton only won the county by a margin of 49.8 per cent to 46.3 per cent and lost the state. 

“Biden’s discomfort with talking about abortion may have been a sore spot within the modern Democratic Party, but not here in culturally conservative north-eastern Pennsylvania,” observed the commentator Charles McElwee.

“Harris, by contrast, has been a leader on abortion rights – the first vice president or president to visit a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic – and has long positioned herself to the left of voters like north-eastern Pennsylvania’s Catholics.” 

Polls show Harris leading Trump among Latino voters, who are mostly Catholic, but by a smaller margin than either Biden or Clinton. Latino voters are crucial in parts of Pennsylvania, and in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada.  

After Harris announced she would not attend the Al Smith dinner on 17 October, a charity event hosted by the Archdiocese of New York traditionally attended by both major presidential candidates, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York said she was “not getting good advice”.

The proportion of Argentinians who regard Pope Francis favourably declined by nearly 30 per cent in a decade. According to a Pew survey, 64 per cent of Argentinians regard the Pope positively now, compared to 91 per cent 10 years ago. 

The survey canvassed opinion last year among 6,234 adults in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru and the United States.

Titled “How People in Latin America and the US view Pope Francis”, the poll found 48 per cent of Chileans held a positive view of the Pope, compared to 68 per cent of Mexicans and Brazilians. In Colombia, his popularity rating stood at 72 per cent, compared to 83 per cent a decade ago.

In the United States, however, his rating has remained the same since his election in 2013, with 57 per cent of Catholics regarding the Pope favourably.

The leadership of the Syro-Malabar Church denied that liturgical disputes in its primatial diocese caused tensions at its synod in the southern Indian state of Kerala. 

The Church’s thirty-second synod of bishops on 22-25 August was the first since an apparent settlement of debates over the celebration of the Syro-Malabar liturgy, the Holy Qurbana, in the Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly earlier this year. 

A spokesman for the hierarchy, Fr Anthony Vadakkekra, reported that a delegation from the archeparchy had given Major Archbishop Raphael Thattil a letter asking him not to praise his predecessor Cardinal George Allencherry, but said there was no further disruption. 

“The reports appearing in social media that leaflets demanding removal of Archbishop Andrews Thazhath, the former apostolic administrator of the diocese, were distributed by the rebel faction have been fabricated. There is no truth in them,” Fr Vadakkekra said.

Pope Francis said he offered sanctuary in the Vatican to Aung San Suu Kyi, the former leader of Myanmar. “I called for the release of Mrs Aung San Suu Kyi and received her son in Rome,” he told a meeting of Jesuits in Jakarta during his visit last month to south-east Asia.  

The Pope responded to a question from a Myanmar Jesuit about how the country’s people might advance in hope amid the turmoil and violence following a military coup in 2021 and the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.  

The Pope described the situation in Myanmar as “difficult”, saying: “In Myanmar today you cannot be silent: you have to do something! The future of your country must be peace, based on respect for the dignity and rights of all.”

Japan’s bishops said the acquittal of a man after 50 years on death row showed the need to abolish the death penalty.

“Even if a person is wrongfully convicted, once human life and dignity have been taken away by the death penalty they cannot be restored,” said Archbishop Tarcisio Kikuchi Isao of Tokyo, president of the Japanese bishops’ conference, after a retrial of Iwao Hakamada found he had been convicted in 1968 for the murder of his employer and his family on manipulated evidence. 

“With the verdict of acquittal of Mr Hakamada, we would like to call on Japanese society to once again consider the merits and demerits of the death penalty,” said Archbishop Kikuchi. 

“We believe that the merciful God will extend His healing hand to Mr Hakamada, who has been forced to live a life of suffering as a wrongfully convicted death row inmate.”

World Youth Day (WYD) organisers unveiled the logo and theme for the 2027 edition in Seoul.  Pope Francis chose the theme “Take courage!  I have overcome the world” (John 16:33) for the event in the South Korean capital. Bishop Kyun-sang Lee, an auxiliary in the Archdiocese of Seoul and its WYD coordinator, said the theme “resonates deeply” with the Korean Church and “the challenges confronting today’s youth”.

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