The Brazilian government has declared a health emergency in the territory of the Yanomami people in Brazil’s northernmost state, Roraima, where it is estimated that almost a hundred Yanomami children died in 2022.
The minister for indigenous peoples, Sônia Guajajara, has said that 570 died during the four years of the Bolsonaro government. The reasons are neglect and the presence of gold prospectors, who not only destroy the environment, but poison the rivers with mercury, depriving the Yanomami of key food supply, and bringing malaria.
Unrest following the removal from office of President Pedro Castillo is continuing in Peru. The number of dead is now put at 53.
Despite the state of emergency in force since 14 December, there has been a march on Lima from the south of the country, and there is considerable indignation at the action of the police, who used an armoured vehicle to demolish part of the wall of the University of San Marcos, Peru’s most important university, and mistreated marchers who were staying there and students, forcing them on to the ground before handcuffing them.
Journalists were also arrested. According to the minister of the interior 370 people have been arrested since the beginning of the protests. Meanwhile, Pope Francis urged dialogue and peaceful solutions to the crisis in Peru. He joined the Peruvian bishops in saying, “No to violence from wherever it comes. No to death.”
They denounced the murder of a young policeman by a mob on 9 January during protests in the southern Puno region. The 29-year-old officer was burned alive inside a police vehicle. They sent condolences to his relatives, to the National Police of Peru, and to families of civilians killed during clashes.
Spanish dioceses are being targeted by cyber criminals who are sending Church employees phishing emails apparently signed by the local bishop or priests.
Last week, employees of the northeastern Diocese of Gerona received emails, allegedly from the diocesan administrator, asking them to buy 20 iTunes/Apple cards worth 100 euros each as a “surprise” to incentivise church workers. In the Diocese of Cartagena, fake emails were sent from an account using the name of the local bishop.
According to the Spanish weekly, Alfa y Omega, a fraudster tried to scam church employees in the Archdiocese of Madrid over the telephone, by claiming while requesting money to be the vicar general.
Bishops in Honduras have helped design a law to support internally displaced peoples. Nearly 250,000 Hondurans have now left their homes due to violence, according to the UNCHR.
“The problem has been getting worse,” said Fany Martinez, co-ordinator of the displacement office of the Honduran Bishops’ Conference. She added: “Up until now, the displaced consisted of families, but now entire communities are leaving their neighbourhoods.”
The Church was part of discussions on developing the law which will provide a humanitarian aid fund for the displaced and access to mental health services. It will also help displaced children return to education. Approved by Congress in December, the law has yet to be ratified by the Honduran president.
“Beware of land grabbing; Central Africans are in danger of becoming foreigners in their own country,” said the bishops of Central African Republic last week.
They criticised land takeovers by foreign interests, denouncing how “large arable plots of several hectares and strategic places of mining and forestry exploitation are being sold”. They added that “we have nothing against the injection of foreign capital into the weak Central African economic fabric, on condition that it creates wealth and work for the daughters and sons of this country”.
Bishop Nestor-Désiré Nongo-Aziagbia of Bossangoa, President of the Episcopal Conference, raised the issue of revising land laws with President Faustin Archange Touadéra during a meeting on 14 January. He also reported people’s worries about education, health, roads and fuel shortages.
Mai-Mai rebels in the Congo have shot a seminarian in the leg after opening fire on a car. Héritier Mambaya, 22, is in hospital for a procedure to extract a bullet from his leg. The shooting occurred at 7am on January 23, as four Comboni postulants were returning by car from the countryside with their formator.
Fr Léonard Ndjadi Ndjate, Provincial of the Comboni Missionaries in the Congo, has condemned the attack, criticising “the inability of the authorities to protect people in the east of the Congo”. He asked for prayers for peace for the region.
Pope Francis is due to visit the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 31 January.
Care Net Pregnancy Resource Center of Southeastern Connecticut, a pro-life pregnancy centre, announced it was dropping a suit against a new law that bans “deceptive advertising” by such centres after assurances the state had no plans to prosecute them.
“Connecticut Attorney General Tong revealed in the litigation that he is not aware of any women being deceived by pro-life pregnancy centres. Therefore, he currently has no basis to enforce this law. Our client, Care Net New London, will continue to focus their energy and resources on serving unborn children and their mothers,” said Mark Lippelman, who represented the centre.
Lawyers for former cardinal Theodore McCarrick argued that the 92 year-old should not be forced to stand trial on charges that he sexually abused a young man 50 years ago during a visit to Massachusetts.
A court motion filed by McCarrick’s lawyers indicated that in December, David Schretlen, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, examined McCarrick and concluded he suffered from neurological defects and impaired memory and cognition.
McCarrick is charged with three counts of indecent assault and battery and could face five years in prison if convicted.
The 118-year old French nun listed as the oldest person in the world by the Guinness Book of Records has died.
Soeur André, a daughter of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, attributed her longevity to imbibing a glass of wine daily. Blind and wheelchair bound, she claimed to have worked until the age of 108, saying “Work doesn’t kill you.” Some of the 40 orphans she had cared for at a hospital in the south of France made contact with her in later years via the internet.
Every day, she would rise at 7am, devoting a large chunk of her day to prayer, saying: “I pray above all for people who are suffering because I like to spoil people.”
Myanmar’s Catholic archbishops appealed for peace last weekend. “The destruction of lives is a heart-wrenching tragedy,” said Cardinal Charles Bo, Archbishop of Yangon, Archbishop Marco Tin Win of Mandalay and Archbishop Basilio Athai of Taunggyi.
“Peace is possible, peace is the only way,” they said. The bishops added that “places of worship and monasteries, where communities sought peace and reconciliation are themselves increasingly under attack”.
Pope Francis led prayers for peace in Myanmar last Sunday from the Vatican.
Myanmar’s army destroyed more Church buildings in northeast Myanmar on 15 January. The Catholic Church of the Assumption and the nearby convent of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Mary in Chan Thar, Mandalay Archdiocese, were burnt down. The sisters fled with some 3,000 villagers.
Around 300 people in New Delhi have protested against attacks on tribal Christians in the central state of Chhattisgarh.
Some 1,000 tribal Christian families have been forced to abandon their villages by violent mobs angry at their conversion to Christianity. And in Maharashtra a Catholic priest who heads an education project has sought police protection for teachers after a group on an education trip was attacked by Hindu nationalists on a train on 16 January.
They accused the teachers of being missionaries and converting indigenous tribal people.
Fr Constancio Rodrigues said: “Our organisation has been helping school students who are weak educationally and economically for over five decades and never converted anyone as is being alleged.”
Pakistan’s parliament has amended its blasphemy law, raising alarm that it could fuel rights abuses against religious minorities. The Criminal Laws (Amendment) Bill was passed on 17 January, increasing punishment for insulting the Prophet’s companions, wives, and family members to 10 years along with a fine.
The amendment was described as “unfortunate” by Peter Jacob, director of the Lahore-based Centre for Social Justice and former director of the bishops’ National Commission for Justice and Peace.
He feared that a law which can already mean death for those deemed to have insulted Islam or the Prophet Muhammad, can now also be used to punish anyone convicted of insulting people connected to him.
“Our demands have been ignored yet again by this amendment”, he said, referring to the lobby of Christian groups for repeal of the blasphemy law, which has often led to false charges, harassment, and persecution of Christians.
Bishop Francis Xavier Vira Arpondratana of Chiang Mai has blessed a new centre in the city dedicated to training catechists serving ethnic Hmong Catholics in the north. The International Hmong Center was inaugurated on 19 January in the presence of around 500 mostly Hmong people, among an estimated 250,000 in Thailand.
Bishop Arpondratana praised the new facility as an important pastoral and study centre for the Hmong community in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. He said: “In the future, the Hmong people will have another instrument for evangelisation, and believers in the lay ministry of the catechist are the protagonists.”
The persecution of Christians is at its highest point in three decades, according to the latest report from advocacy group Open Doors.
The World Watch List, released by Open Doors last week, reported that, overall, the number of Christians facing persecution worldwide remained steady in 2022 at approximately 360 million. In a list of the 50 countries with the most persecution, North Korea returned to the first spot.
The Family of Mary, a post-Vatican II clerical/lay association active in about 10 countries, has been put under Vatican tutelage, according to the Italian Catholic news agency Adista. An apostolic visitation last year concluded it was guilty of spiritual abuse and serious sectarian disfunction.
Its head, the Austrian Fr Paul Maria Sigl, was relieved of his post and replaced by Italian auxiliary bishop Daniele Libanori, the same prelate who exposed the multiple sexual abuse by the well-known Jesuit artist Fr Marko Rupnik.
According to its website, the association counts over 60 priests, 30 seminarists and lay brothers, 200 “apostolic sisters" and families, mostly from East European countries.
In Amsterdam, it runs a chapel called “The Lady of All Nations” that originally commemorated what it called Marian apparitions that supposedly occurred there between 1945 and 1959. The Vatican ruled in December 2020 that it did not recognise these purported apparitions, although use of the title for Mary was allowed.
The Vatican has ordered Fr Tony Anatrella, a French Church psychologist active in the Vatican's rejection of gay priests under Pope Benedict XVI, to cease his practice after allegations he sexually abused men being treated to “cure their homosexuality”.
It also barred him from public celebration of Mass or confession, according to a statement by the Paris archdiocese.
Now 81, Anatrella, once named the “Church’s shrink”, has been accused of abuse in Paris for at least 15 years. The archdiocese had suspended him from active ministry in 2018 and told him to stop “all therapeutic activity”. Long a consultor to Vatican dicasteries, Anatrella has publicly argued that homosexuals could not become priests and that gender theory was being imposed on African countries.
“This is a big disappointment for the victims because the sexual assaults committed by Tony Anatrella are of a particular gravity because they took place in a therapeutic context,” said a lawyer for abuse victims, Nadia Debbache.
Syndicate criminal gangs have taken control of South Africa and are destroying the country and its infrastructure, according to Bishop Sithembele Anton Sipuka, president of the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
In his opening address at the ongoing bishops’ plenary assembly in the Archdiocese of Pretoria, he said, “We are becoming a country controlled by syndicate criminals who destroy the country's infrastructure, steal railway lines, copper wires, and electricity lines, and vandalize infrastructure and buildings; our churches and buildings are vandalized, and the government seems overwhelmed by this.”
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