Before he was stricken with a fever on Friday, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to ever be interviewed in a television studio. He recorded an interview for In His Image, a chat show devoted to Catholic subjects, during a visit to the Rome offices of Rai, Italy’s public broadcaster.
According to Rai, the Pope appealed for world peace and discussed a range of “contemporary themes” in conversation with the show’s host, Lorena Bianchetti. Last year the Pope gave an interview last year to another chat show via video-link with the Vatican. The Rai interview aired on 4 June.
An Augustinian priest has become the ninth priest in the past four years to be murdered in Mexico. Fr Javier García Villafaña, a priest of the archdiocese of Morelia in central-west Mexico, was found dead on a motorway with gunshot wounds last week.
The Mexican bishops’ conference described his murder as a “pointed reminder of the serious situation that society faces while organised crime and impunity continue to threaten the lives of so many”.
The day before the murder, Archbishop Faustino Armendáriz Jiménez of Durango was attacked in his cathedral by a knife-wielding man in his eighties. Although the archbishop was scratched in the attack and his clothes were ripped, he escaped serious injury. A priest and his sacristan restrained his assailant.
A Franciscan University in Ohio is offering an “unplugged scholarship” to students willing to give up using their smartphones. The $5,000 (£4,501) grant was launched in 2022 for undergraduates at the University of Steubenville.
One recipient of the grant said the programme had helped her “sit down to pray”. Theresa Ryan, 18, one of the 80 undergraduates on the scheme said, “It was so much easier to be present.” Recipients of the award meet up monthly to swap experiences and offer each other support.
Police in Nicaragua are investigating several Catholic dioceses for money laundering. They say they have found “hundreds of thousands of dollars” concealed on Church properties. Several diocesan and parish bank accounts have now been frozen in the Central American nation, whose president, Daniel Ortega has been at loggerheads with the Church since 2018, when he claims it supported protests against him.
A Catholic priest in Bangladesh says that education is the key to stopping the custom of girls marrying as young as 13-years-old. Fr Albert Rozario, a priest at St Mary’s Cathedral, Dhaka, said the whole of society including “institutions, schools [and] religious communities” must be “sensitised against early marriage”.
Although by law girls cannot marry in Bangladesh until they are 18, this is frequently ignored, a phenomenon Fr Rozario blamed on poverty, lack of security and “the status of women in society, a mentality that makes women a commodity”. He added that the Christian community “was working hard” to combat the practice.
A recent Unicef report states that 51 per cent or an estimated 34. 5 million girls in Bangladesh are being forced to marry before they are 18. More than 13 million are obliged to marry before their fifteenth birthday, making Bangladesh the country with the highest incidence of under-age marriage for girls in South-East Asia.
Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht is urging the Church to respond to artificial intelligence. The leader of the bishops’ conference of the Netherlands said ChatGPT was spreading false information on religious subjects, citing a recent instance where AI had attributed a book by St Thomas Aquinas to St Albert the Great.
The cardinal said: “We have to try to be present in the field of artificial intelligence ... if we wait too long, others will have introduced more information that will determine the answers.”
The Vatican and Emmanuel Macron have accepted the resignation of Archbishop Luc Ravel of Strasbourg. The President of France had to approve Ravel’s resignation according to the terms of the 1801 concordat between Napoleon I and the Vatican.
Abolished elsewhere in France by the 1905 Laïcité laws, the concordat still prevails in Alsace because it was then part of Germany. Ravel told La Vie magazine he had felt overwhelmed by his role as archbishop but disputed claims he had been authoritarian, saying, “I do not dispute any clumsiness on my part, and I have no claim to infallibility.”
The Diocese of Tombura-Yambio in South Sudan held a second collection last Sunday to raise funds for victims of the war in Sudan. The bishop, Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala, urged the whole diocese for donations to pay for food, healthcare and shelter for those affected by the continuing war in Sudan.
A diocesan spokesman said that the Archdiocese of Khartoum and Diocese of El-Obeid in Sudan were under sustained pressure “as more people knock at the door seeking support – some are lost in the wilderness, trapped in the bombarded in the city of Khartoum and other major cities”.
The newly appointed head of Caritas Internationalis is urging world leaders to find sustainable solutions to ending world hunger. Alistair Dutton said: “Let us raise our voices and tackle the extreme food crisis in Eastern Africa and Horn of Africa where millions of people face severe hunger due to recurring droughts, conflicts, and unjust food systems for which we are all responsible.”
Environmental activists who glued their hands to a statue in the Vatican Museums have told the Vatican’s criminal court they only sought to highlight the urgency of action against climate change. Guido Viero, 62 and Ester Goffi, 26 said that they had had no intention of damaging the marble base of the statue of the Trojan priest, Laocoön and his sons.
The Bishop of Hong Kong Stephen Chow called last week for China and the Vatican to lay aside their mutual “presumptions, hypotheses and prejudice” in a bid to strengthen trust. He made the appeal during a Mass to mark the World Day of Prayer for the Church in China.
The Vatican is calling the Church to embrace the development of green tourism. In a message released for World Tourism Day (27 September), Archbishop Rino Fischella said that the Church was engaging with the event “so that Pope Francis’s magisterium may increase in a more effective and positive way the care of creation”.
The pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation observed that “tourism that respects the person and the environment” opened the way to “grasping the goodness of the Father”. The archbishop encouraged tourism workers to seize the chance to promote an alternative kind of tourism that is “more supportive and less consumerist, more respectful of nature and capable of contemplating beauty”.
A Catholic bishop in Nigeria has warned the nation’s new president not to “pretend that everything is OK” in the country. Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah said Bola Ahmed Tinabu of the All Progressives Congress, who became president on Monday, should identify the causes of Nigerians’ “scars, wounds and injuries”.
Speaking in Abuja, the Bishop of Sokoto said: “Right now, 133 million Nigerians are suffering from various levels of multi-dimensional poverty.” He added: “Our suffering is not determined by our religious or ethnic affiliation. Rather, it is a result of a malfunctioning country.”
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