Russia's Catholic Church has condemned planned religious law changes, which will require all clergy who studied abroad to undergo supervision and retraining. "We agree that priests coming to serve in Russia should be familiar with its history, culture and religious heritage and not preach extremist ideas", said Fr Kirill Gorbunov, vicar-general of the Church's Moscow-based Mother of God archdiocese. "Until the law is violated, however, it should be up to the confessions to monitor this. Attempts by the state to regulate this process, far from producing effective solutions, will merely lead to intractable contradictions".
The Russian-born priest was reacting to draft amendments to Russia's 1997 federal law on freedom of conscience and religious associations, which will bar "personnel of religious organisations" with foreign spiritual education from ministering without mandatory re-certification by a Russian educational institution.
Christian pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong and other Hong Kong activists were detained last week for allegedly attending an unauthorised protest last October. Wong, 23, said his arrest was politically motivated and designed to undermine a protest march for National Day on 1 October. Jackie Hung, project officer of the Justice and Peace Commission of Hong Kong Diocese, said the arrests "will increase young people's anxiety about the future of Hong Kong."
The first new Orthodox church for more than a century has been dedicated in the Polish capital, Warsaw, decades after most other Orthodox places of worship were destroyed or seized by militant nationalists.
"Human memory is steadfast, even if particular generations weaken in their knowledge of history with the passage of time", said Archbishop Jakub Pankowski of Wroclaw-Szczecin, a leader of Poland's Orthodox minority during the first service at the Hagia Sophia basilica in Warsaw's Ursynow suburb, built to serve some of the city's estimated 40,000 Orthodox Christians.
A Filipino bishop has reported that the coronavirus pandemic has brought misery to overseas workers from the Philippines. Bishop Narciso Abellana of Romblon in the Visayas region said, “many of our overseas workers are forced to come back home with no security for a better life.” He reported that, “many of them are now stranded in the Philippines because they cannot leave the country to work while others are stranded abroad because they do not have the money to come home.” Nearly 200,000 retrenched workers have been forced to return or remain home. Remittances from overseas Filipino workers usually account for about 10 per cent of the Philippines GDP. Meanwhile, Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle has recovered from the coronavirus, the Philippines bishops’ news service announced last week.
Desecrations at the church of St Peter in Makurdi, in Nigeria’s central Benue State, in August and September have forced Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi to suspend Masses. Unknown vandals looted the Eucharist and sacred vessels in a Blessed Sacrament chapel and the main church building. Attacks on churches have risen amidst an upsurge in violence in Nigeria.
The first new church built in Turkey since the Republic of Turkey was formed in 1923 is nearing completion. Turkish media is presenting it as a sign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s magnanimity towards Christian communities, especially to counter criticism of Hagia Sofia’s reconversion to a mosque. St Ephrem church was constructed at the request of the Syriac Orthodox community, close to Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport. Around 25,000 Syriac Orthodox Christians live in Turkey, mostly in suburbs of Istanbul. The church will house their head, Metropolitan Yusuf Çetin.
The US government announced last week that it is donating US$2.5 million to internally displaced Iraqi Christians currently sheltering in the Kurdistan Region. Speaking at St Joseph’s Church in Erbil, in the presence of Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda of Erbil, US Consul General Rob Waller said it will be administered by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through the newly established Ankawa Humanitarian Committee, an affiliate of Erbil’s Chaldean Archdiocese. The first phase of the money will be spent on covering housing costs of between 2,000 and 2,500 displaced Christian families.
The Kenyan Bishops’ new national television channel is to be headed by a nun. Sr Agnes Lucy Lando, who has a PhD in social communications, said the closure of churches due to the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the initiative. "It was the desire of the Bishops to remain in touch with Christians and they, therefore, requested that the establishment of Ukweli TV be accelerated so that it would be used as a tool for evangelisation and reach out to Christians with messages of hope and encouragement." “Ukweli” is the Swahili word for truth.
Archbishop Luis Cabrera of Guayaquil, Ecuador, called for Catholics to return to Mass and observe the Sunday Obligation beginning 27 September. The nationwide state of emergency expired on 13 September, and a ban on large gatherings and a night-time curfew were lifted. The port city of Guayaquil was hit hard in the early weeks of the pandemic in Latin America, and many families are still seeking information about their deceased loved ones.
Interim Bolivian President Jeanine Añez dropped out of the presidential race on 17 September, a month before the 18 October vote. She was trailing in the polls and said she dropped out to help consolidate the conservative vote. Leftist former economy minister Luis Arce, of former president Evo Morales’ MAS party, is leading in the polls. Añez took office after Morales left the country following the contested 2019 election.
The Bolivian Episcopal Conference released a statement on 19 September saying that violence has no part in the political process.
Tensions between the US and the Vatican have increased after Pope Francis refused to meet with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his European visit this week to discuss the Sino-Vatican agreement. The reason given was concerns surrounding impartiality about the upcoming US election, but Mr Pompeo’s public call recently for the Vatican to abandon the accord surprised Vatican officials, one calling it “megaphone diplomacy.” Mr Pompeo is expected to attend talks in Vatican City with the Holy See's secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin and secretary for relations with states Archbishop Paul Gallagher.
Mr Pompeo has been vocal in his criticism of the Vatican’s intention to extend its accord with China, which expires this month. He tweeted: "Two years ago, the Holy See reached an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), hoping to help China's Catholics. Yet the CCP’s abuse of the faithful has only gotten worse. " He called on the Vatican to "renounce the agreement since it would jeopardise its moral authority.”
The president of Spain's Bishops Conference has warned of social conflict if the Socialist-led government goes ahead with plans to remove Christian symbols and conduct further exhumations from the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid, from where the remains of the former dictator, General Franciso Franco (1892-1975), were removed and reburied in October 2019.
"This issue particularly concerns the church of Madrid - but the Bishops Conference is also willing to help foster dialogue in society", said Cardinal Cardinal Juan Jose Omella of Barcelona. "But severe wounds have been left by the Covid crisis, and many people are now without work - so politicians should be seeking agreement and reconciliation, leaving aside polemical issues and calming society by addressing the things that truly worry it".
The Conference president made his comments after Rome talks with the Pope, amid plans by premier Pedro Sanchez's radical government to remove a giant Cross and other Christian symbols from the memorial site, under a new Democratic Memory Law, finalised on 15 September. More than 55,000 Spaniards have signed a petition against the move, which coincides with mounting Church-state tensions over accompanying government legislation to secularise education, permit euthanasia and liberalise state-funded abortion.
An Association to Defend the Valley of the Fallen, which contains a Catholic basilica and Benedictine monastery, as well as the graves of over 34,000 Civil War victims, has also vowed to oppose the government's proposed redesign of the site in international courts.
Speaking on Heritage Day on 24 September, Bishop Victor Hlolo Phalana of Klerksdorp the President of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference. said it is, "corruption that represents the main threat to our national heritage."
"The coronavirus seems to have reinforced the greed that has conquered our country in the last 10 years," he said.
Repeating the concerns of the Conference President, who spoke out last month, Bishop Phalana criticised the recent scandals concerning embezzlement of funds allocated to fighting Covid-19. He felt, "corruption equals treason and socio-economic terrorism and should be treated as such.”
More than 16,000 fires have been detected in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, the highest number on record since 1998 while in the Amazon, Brazil’s National Spatial Research Institute detected 29,307 fires during August.
Archbishop João Justino de Medeiros Silva of Montes Claros published a letter this week on the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference website, saying, "The need for effective public policies to protect our common home is extremely urgent.” In his opening speech at the UN General Assembly, on 22 September, President Jair Bolsonaro said that Brazil has been the victim of “the most brutal disinformation campaigns about the Amazon and the Pantanal wetlands”, claiming that international institutions act with “ulterior interests.”
Women Religious internationally have launched a campaign to call for politicians and humanitarian organisations to listen to them in post-pandemic planning. The International Union Superiors General (UISG), the organisation of heads of religious orders, counting more than 650,000 members, launched their #YouAreMySister campaign on 24 September.Loreto Sister Patricia Murray, UISG executive secretary, said, “sisters are uniquely placed to help address the most pressing issues in poor communities brought about by the pandemic.” She warned that sisters are seeing a rise in human trafficking.
Bishops must ask themselves why their voices are not being sufficiently heard during the corona pandemic, a German bishop has underlined.“We must look back in hindsight and look into what was called for and what we should have done differently. As bishops, we must critically ask ourselves whether we should not have done far, far more for the old and the sick from the beginning of the lockdown,” the chairman of the pastoral commission and vice-president of the German bishops’ conference, Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück, told journalists during the conference’s autumn plenary in Fulda in the third week of September.
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