Ahead of Sierra Leone’s general election on 24 June, Fr Peter Kontec, executive director of the national Caritas organisation, added his prayers for a peaceful, free and fair vote.
Addressing the ninth congress of the Regional Union of the diocesan Priests of West Africa in Freetown, he said: “May the upcoming elections in Sierra Leone be marked by peace, fairness, and a renewed commitment to the common good.”
Past general elections in Sierra Leone have witnessed violence, killings and internal displacement. Last month the newly-consecrated Bishop of Makeni, John Hassan Koroma, made a similar plea.
Last Sunday saw the first funerals for the victims of an Islamist attack on a school near Uganda’s border with the DR Congo.
At least 42 people including 38 pupils were murdered by militants linked to Islamic State, who assaulted girls’ and boys’ dormitories with machetes and gunshots and set them alight. Minutes earlier, the young people had been heard singing gospel songs before settling down for the night. The attack on the Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School lasted about 90 minutes. Some of the 60 boarders who lived in the compound are still missing, believed abducted.
Pope Francis prayed last Sunday for “the young student victims of the brutal attack”. Fr Sunday Augustine Masereka of Kasese diocese in western Uganda said innocent people continue to die in “a forgotten war” in nearby DR Congo.
Aid to the Church in Need reported that 11 priests were kidnapped in Nigeria’s Kaduna State in the past 18 months, the most recent being Fr Jeremiah Yakubu, abducted on 11 June.
He was taken by gunmen from his parish in Karku and released the following day. “We would like to thank all those who have prayed for the speedy release of our priest and the others who are still in the hands of their kidnappers,” said a representative of the Diocese of Kafanchan.
On 7 June in the southern state of Edo, Fr Charles Onomhoale Igechi, a priest of the Archdiocese of Benin City, was assassinated.
Columban missionaries in Fiji are leading initiatives to implement the principles of Laudato Sì’ to conserve life on Pacific islands threated by climate change and rising sea levels.
Recent study days in the capital Suva discussed raising awareness and action “to give the new generations a chance”, they said. “
At the heart of Laudato Sì’ there is the call to be peacemakers: therefore work of reconciliation is necessary at all levels, among ourselves, in the different groups of our society, in our relationship to our common home,” said the Columban Justice and Peace and Integrity of Creation Commission, which works with a forum for interreligious dialogue set up with youth in Suva.
Pope Francis has prayed for the migrants who died on 14 June in the Mediterranean off the Greek coast.
More than 100 migrants were saved but at least 79 died and hundreds were still missing after a boat capsized and sank while heading from Libya to southern Italy. The passengers were largely from Syria, Egypt, the Palestinian territories and Pakistan.
At last Sunday’s Angelus, Francis said: “I reiterate my prayer for those who have lost their lives, and I implore that everything possible is done to prevent similar tragedies.”
Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens, primate of the Orthodox Church of Greece, said that “no words can express the deepest pain I feel today as a human being and as a clergyman for the untimely and tragic loss of dozens of our fellow human beings”.
The International Catholic Migration Commission called for safer alternatives for migrants.
At their annual spring plenary, the US Catholic bishops voted to allow the doctrine committee to begin revising the ethical and religious directives for Catholic healthcare institutions treating transgender people.
The Church’s hospitals and nursing facilities treat a seventh of US patients. Several bishops, including Cardinal Joseph Tobin and Cardinal Robert McElroy, urged broad consultation within the medical community and with people with gender dysphoria.
Fr Charles Bouchard, senior director of theology at the Catholic Health Association, asked: “Will we into the future continue to see human sexuality as what we call binary, male and female, or are there shades between? What does this mean from a theological perspective?”
Representatives of the Catholic Church and many Orthodox Churches signed a major joint declaration in Alexandria on 7 June, after a week-long meeting of the members of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
The text, “Synodality and Primacy in the Second Millennium and Today”, surveys the last millennium of theological disagreement between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on the fraught relationship between papal primacy and the authority of local churches.
“The Church is not properly understood as a pyramid, with a primate governing from the top,” the document says, “but neither is it properly understood as a federation of self-sufficient Churches. Our historical study of synodality and primacy in the second millennium has shown the inadequacy of both of these views.”
The 24 Orthodox delegates took part in the meeting on behalf of ten autonomous churches, including representatives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, considered the first amongst equals in sections of the global Orthodox community, the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem, and the Orthodox Churches of Greece and Cyprus.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kyril, was notably absent from the meeting despite having signed a related document, “Synodality and Primacy During the First Millennium”, in 2016.
On behalf of Pope Francis, Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the commission's co-chairman, gave Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria a copy of the seventeenth-century foundation stone of St Peter’s Square.
Pope Francis expressed his “shame and dismay” at clerical abuse in Bolivia in a letter to the country’s president.
On 31 May the Pope wrote in reply to a letter from President Luis Arce regarding revelations of abuse by the Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas Moreno and other members of religious orders. Francis said he was “moved and shocked” to think of “the disastrous actions of those priests and also of the negligence of those who should have exercised oversight”.
He assured President Arce of his “firm desire to respond with the full cooperation of the Church to work alongside the government of your country”.
Bishop José Cobo, a 57-year-old auxiliary in the Archdiocese of Madrid, will be its next archbishop. His appointment, replacing the retired Cardinal Carlos Osoro, was announced on 12 June and he will be installed on 8 July.
Archbishop-elect Cobo, who was ordained in the archdiocese in 1994, said that he wanted to “reposition the Church” in a changing society. “It’s not so much about innovating as it is about embodying the Gospel message in the reality that we have,” he said.
Pope Francis sent his good wishes to Outreach, the LGBTQ ministry resource, ahead of a conference at Fordham University on 16-18 June.
Writing at the start of May to Fr James Martin SJ, the editor of the Outreach website, Francis thanked him for “all the good you are doing” and sent “my best regards to members of the meeting”. He previously wrote to Fr Martin ahead of Outreach conferences in 2021 and ’22, and received him in the apostolic palace last November.
The day before the German bishops’ conference was due to meet to discuss the financing of a permanent synodal council where bishops and lay Catholics would share decision-making, the Diocese of Regensburg announced that it was against the synodal path for Church reform.
A statement published on the diocesan website on 18 June said that for bishops to share decision-making with the laity was against canon law and against Pope Francis’ concept of synodality. Francis wanted Catholics to listen to each other but to leave decision-making to the bishops and the Pope, the statement said.
Financial decisions by the bishops’ conference must be unanimous.
Guido Viero and Ester Goffi, who glued themselves to a statue in the Vatican Museums last August, were convicted last Monday of criminal damage. A Vatican court ordered the environmental activists to pay around €30,000 and each given a nine-month suspended sentence.
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