Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta confirmed last Saturday through his canon law lawyer and spokesperson, Javier Belda Iniesta, that he would travel from the Vatican to Argentina this week. Zanchetta faces charges of “aggravated continuous sexual abuse” of two seminarians. He denies the allegations.
Prosecutors said they requested an arrest warrant for Zanchetta because he had not responded to phone calls or emails. Zanchetta has been staying at the Santa Marta hotel in the Vatican, and the charges against Zanchetta call into question his relationship with Pope Francis. He stepped down as bishop of Orán, Argentina in 2017 and was named to a senior administrative position at the Vatican that same year.
An award named after Mother Teresa has been given at a ceremony in Mumbai for outstanding efforts in social justice to a US-based organisation that revealed forced organ harvesting in China. Dr Torsten Trey, founder of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, said the campaign began in 2006 after he discovered that Chinese prisoners were being killed to supply China’s organ transplant industry. Many have been members of the Falun Gong movement. At the ceremony, Trey said: “If we just sit and watch it happen, saying it’s not my country, we are all being complicit in the crime.” Other awardees included Hasina Kharbhih, founder of the Impulse Network which rescues trafficked women in Asia, and Evelien Hölsken for a charity helping victims of child prostitution put their abusers behind bars. The Mother Teresa Memorial Award is run by the Mumbai-based Harmony Foundation.
Half of Venice’s 120 churches were damaged in recent floods and they include one of the oldest churches in the city, a Byzantine basilica established in the seventh century. The ancient Santa Maria Assunta Basilica, and the adjacent Santa Maria Fosca church, were “abundantly flooded” three times last week, with the lagoon salt water seeping into mosaic floors and the marble columns, said Alessandro Polet, spokesman for the Venice Patriarchy. At St Mark’s Baslica the damage to the crypt is expected to be extensive.
More than 150 students, faculty and alumni of Boston College protested over a planned donation to the school’s political science department from the Koch Foundation. The libertarian foundation has funded a variety of causes protesters deemed to be at odds with Catholic social teaching. A petition signed by 1,000 members of the Jesuit community said, “As a Jesuit institution, we have a moral duty to put the common good above all else, and we believe the acceptance of this grant would legitimise the past, self-interested actions of the Koch Foundation.”
An independent investigation into allegations of sexual and other misconduct made last year by former seminarians at St. John’s seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, issued its report last week, finding that there were no systemic problems with sexual misconduct, only isolated incidents. The investigation, led by former U.S. attorney Donald Stern, did fault Mgr James Moroney, rector at the time the allegations were made, for being absent from the school. The report also indicated there was a clear connection between excessive alcohol and other forms of misconduct, and faulted Cardinal Sean O’Malley for taking Moroney’s promise to address the problems without following up to ensure compliance.
On Friday last week, a dozen demonstrators and a parish priest were evacuated from the St Michael Archangel Church in Masaya, Nicaragua, after a nine-day hunger strike. The group, including several mothers, called for their loved ones to be freed from prison. The prisoners face charges related to protests against the Ortega government that began in 2018.
The Masaya mothers called for the release 130 political prisoners. Police circled the church and detained 13 activists who went to the church to deliver supplies to the hunger strikers. The Archdiocese of Managua said that the decision was made to evacuate the group because Fr Edwing Román's health was at risk.
On November 18, a group of mothers and several relatives of other detainees began a second hunger strike at the Managua Cathedral in a show of solidarity. Ortega supporters stormed the church, attacking the hunger strikers, and Bishop Rodolfo López was beaten inside the cathedral.
Bolivia’s acting president Jeanine Áñez promulgated an agreement on Sunday to hold new elections. First an Electoral Tribunal must be formed, which will select the new election date. Former president Evo Morales is barred from running in the new elections and acting Interior Minister Arturo Murillo says that the government will seek to prosecute Morales for terrorism and sedition. Speaking from Mexico City, Morales says he is still the legitimate president.
Thirty-two people have been killed in protests since the contested 20 October elections. Bishop Aurelio Pesoa Ribera, auxiliary of La Paz and Secretary General of the Bishops’ Conference, said, “Dialogue is the correct way to overcome the differences between Bolivians… …Holding new, transparent and trustworthy elections is the best way to overcome these differences democratically and peacefully.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah insisted at the launch of the German edition of his new book, “The Day is now Far Spent” in Weltenburg Abbey, Germany, on 21 November that “syncretism is not a project of the Vatican”. He denied that the Vatican wants to merge Christianity and Islam and create a “world religion”, and asked what the lay faithful should do in the face of confusion in the Church, he said: “You have to follow your bishops” unless “someone declares a different doctrine”.
A Kenyan-born religious nun ministering in the Democratic Republic of Congo was on Thursday last week named the winner of this year’s Opus Prize, receiving US1 million at St Louis University’s Center for Global Citizenship in Missouri, USA. Sr Catherine Mutindi, a member of the religious congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd was selected based on her apostolate toward ending child labour.
The Diocese of Peoria announced last week that Venerable Fulton Sheen will be beatified on 21 December at the city’s Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception. Sheen was ordained a priest of the diocese in that cathedral on 20 September 1919. He was a television catechist during the 1950s and ’60s in the United States whose show “Life is Worth Living” reached an audience of millions. The miracle attributed to the intercession of Sheen involves the unexplained recovery of James Fulton Engstrom, a boy born apparently stillborn in September 2010 to Bonnie and Travis Engstrom of the Peoria-area town of Goodfield, whose parents prayed to Sheen to intercede for their son.
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