Cardinal Kurt Koch has written to Jewish leaders, assuring them that recent comments by Pope Francis did not devalue the Torah. The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, which oversees the Vatican’s religious relations with Jews, published two letters on 10 September, written by Cardinal Koch, president of the council. The letters, dated 3 September, were addressed respectively to Rabbi Rasson Arussi, chair of the Commission of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel for the Dialogue with the Holy See in Jerusalem, and Rabbi David Sandmel, chair of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations in New York. The Pontifical Council said that Arussi had written to Koch on 12 August, concerning Pope Francis’ general audience address of 11 August, dedicated to the Mosaic Law. The Pope said: “The Torah, the Law, in fact, was not included in the promise made to Abraham … Having said this, one should not think that St. Paul was opposed to the Mosaic Law. No, he observed it … The Law, however, does not give life, it does not offer the fulfilment of the promise because it [cannot].” “In the Holy Father's address, the Torah is not devalued, as he expressly affirms that Paul was not opposed to Mosaic law,” Koch wrote. “The abiding Christian conviction is that Jesus Christ is the new way of salvation. This does not mean that the Torah is … no longer recognised as the ‘way of salvation for Jews.’”
An association of Catholic doctors in Kenya has warned the government against forcing civil servants to take the Covid vaccine. The government in August said all public servants should take the vaccine, an instruction the Kenya Catholic Doctors’ Association said was illegal, unethical, and equal to forcefully recruiting the officials into clinical trials. “It is unfortunate that public servants are being coerced to receive the investigational vaccine when there are cheap, readily available and effective treatments that reduce the risk of hospitalisation,” said Dr Wahome Thuku, chairperson of the association.
The Brussels-based commission of European bishops has urged the European Union to appoint a new Special Representative for Religious Freedom, after the weekend resignation of Christos Stylianides after just four months in office. In a Twitter post, Comece recalled it had taken 18 months to name Stylianides for the post, and swift action was now essential to prove the EU's “real commitment to improving the precarious situations religious minorities are facing worldwide”.
A government minister in Belarus has reprimanded an official daily newspaper after it published a front-page cartoon, equating Catholic priests with Nazis, and told the Church the newspaper's attitude does not “represent a state position”. However, the daily, Minskaya Pravda, defended its action, accusing the Catholic church of playing “a game on the side of Catholic Poland”. The cartoon was condemned last week by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, in a rare show of opposition, and the nuncio expressed concern.
In a press release after their September plenary, the bishops from across Scandinavia criticised the Pope’s near-outlawing of the traditional Latin Mass, as promulgated in the motu proprio Traditiones Custodes, warning that disillusionment with current practices “will not be prevented with bans”.
Prominent children’s rights campaigners, including Columban Missionary Fr Shay Cullen, have welcomed the Philippines parliament’s approval of a bill on 6 September banning marriages involving minors, which is widespread in Muslim-majority Mindanao Island. Fr Cullen, 78, who runs the Preda Foundation which has lobbied on this issue said: “It is a form of human trafficking by the parents or relatives, who for a payment or as dowry – which can be money or animals or a piece of land – give their young daughter, as young as 12, to an older man as a live-in partner.” He warned: “It will take years for the law to be implemented.”
Happening (L'événement), a French drama about illegal abortion in the 1960s, has won the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. The film, by director Audrey Diwan, portrays a young woman desperate to arrange a termination in order to continue her studies, at a time – in France in 1963 – when it could mean a prison term, or death at the hands of the illegal abortionist.
Artefacts looted by British troops from Ethiopia in 1868 have been returned to the Ethiopian embassy in London. They include an imperial shield, a Bible and crosses. At the ceremony in London on 10 September, the Ethiopian ambassador, Teferi Melesse Desta, renewed calls for museums to return all “Maqdala-era” objects.
A new bishop was installed in China”s Wuhan diocese last week, the latest to be ordained under the 2018 deal agreed by the Vatican and China. Franciscan Fr Francis Cui Qingqi was ordained at St Joseph Cathedral in Wuhan, Hubei province, on 8 September with the approval of the state and the state-sanctioned Church. Fr Cui, 57, has been deputy secretary of the state-sanctioned Bishops' Conference of the Catholic Church in China since 2016. He is the sixth bishop ordained under the Vatican-Chinese Communist Party provisional agreement signed in 2018 and renewed in 2020. Meanwhile Hong Kong police arrested members of the group behind the city's Tiananmen Square vigils on 8 September. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China confirmed three members - Simon Leung, Sean Tang and Chan To-wai - had been detained.
A priest was murdered on 6 September in Cap Haitien, in the north of Haiti. Fr André Sylvestre, 70, was attacked while leaving a bank and died in hospital. He worked in the parish of Our Lady of Mercy in Robillard, and also ran an orphanage and outreach to homeless people in his neighbourhood.
Mosul Christians and Muslims celebrated the reopening of the Archbishop’s see last week. “A new chapter is being written in the history of the city, its people, especially the young,” said Chaldean Archbishop Najib Mikhael Moussa, who fled Islamic State forces in 2014. They had levelled much of the city and destroyed 14 churches. “An elderly Muslim man asked me for a favour, to be the first to ring the church bells,” the archbishop said.
A Spanish bishop, known for performing exorcisms, has left the Catholic Church after becoming smitten with author of Satanic erotica, Silvia Caballol. “I have fallen in love and want to do things properly,” said Xavier Novell” who became Spain's youngest bishop in 2010 at the age of 41, in Solsona Diocese, Catalonia. The situation is “not a problem of celibacy but rather of infestation”, a former colleague told the press. Novell’s resignation came with Vatican approval.
The Vatican’s General Secretariat for the Synod n Tuesday last week published the preparatory document, For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission to indicate the guiding principles that will direct the path of the Synod on Synodality. The opening of the Synod will take place in Rome on October 9-10, in the particular Churches on October 17, and will conclude in the Vatican in 2023 with the assembly of bishops from around the world. The preparatory document is intended to facilitate the first phase of listening and consultation of the People of God in the particular Churches, which will take place from October 2021 to April 2022.
In Laikipia, a Kenyan county where British soldiers carry out training, the Catholic Church is offering assistance to families uprooted in two months of violence. Heavily armed bandits have been torching houses, stealing cattle and destroying crops on farms in Ol-Moran area in Laikipia West. At least eight people have died in the violence linked to competition for land between farming and nomadic pastoralist communities. Fr. Giacomo Basso, the parish priest of St Mark”s Catholic Church in Ol-Moran, said families have been arriving at the church with nothing after their houses were torched.
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