Armed gunmen kidnapped six nuns of the Sisters of St Anne in Port-au-Prince on 19 January, when they hijacked their bus during an outbreak of gang violence in Haiti.
The Haitian Conference of Religious condemned the kidnapping, while Bishop Pierre-André Dumas of Anse-à-Veau and Miragoâne said he was willing to take the nuns’ place as a hostage. “This latest odious and barbaric act that shows no respect for the dignity of these consecrated women who give themselves wholeheartedly and completely to God to educate and form the young, the poorest and the most vulnerable of our society,” he said. On Sunday, Pope Francis called for the release of the sisters.
Church agencies on the US-Mexico border demanded more humane migration polices after a woman and her two children drowned in the Rio Grande on 12 January.
Br Obed Cuellar OP, the director of a shelter on the Mexican side of the border, said drownings had become disturbingly routine, as the river can appear deceptively calm and narrow to migrants. He blamed “anti-migration” laws for making them more desperate.
Fr Francisco Gallardo, director of migrant ministries in Mexico’s Diocese of Matamoros, warned that US measures “do not stop migration” for migrants “are going to look for a thousand ways to enter and they’ll find it”. A new immigration law in Texas – opposed by the state’s Catholic bishops – allows police to detain migrants on illegal entry charges.
Bishop Mario Dorsonville of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, a noted advocate of migrants in the US, died unexpectedly on 19 January aged 63. A native of Colombia, Dorsonville had only been installed in the Louisiana diocese last February, after serving since 2015 as an auxiliary bishop in Washington, DC.
He was chair of the US bishops’ conference committee on migration during the Trump administration, and fought its more draconian policies. He had been director of the Hispanic Catholic Centre in the capital before becoming an auxiliary, and in both posts was considered a leader of the Hispanic community.
Western Australia police raided the house of Christopher Saunders, the former Bishop of Broome, 14 January. He was also interviewed by police in Perth the next day, but released without charge.
Saunders resigned his see in 2021 after an earlier police investigation was made public. A Church report into Saunders leaked last September described him as a “sexual predator” who sought to “prey upon vulnerable Aboriginal men and boys”. Saunders has always denied any wrongdoing.
Vietnamese officials met Pope Francis and senior Vatican officials in Rome on 18 January.
Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See’s secretary for relations with states, reported that the meeting with the 16-member delegation from the Communist Party was “very positive” and that he would be visiting Vietnam in April. “I think the Holy Father is keen to go and certainly the Catholic community in Vietnam is very happy for the Holy Father to go,” he added.
Vietnam is home to nearly seven million Catholics, 6.6 per cent of the population of 95 million. The meeting followed a private audience between the Pope and Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong in July, preceding the announcement that a resident papal representative would return to Hanoi for the first time since 1975.
Nearly 7,000 Rohingya refugees were left homeless by a large fire that devastated more than 1,000 shelters in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh on 7 January. The blaze also destroyed or damaged around 120 facilities, including mosques, healthcare centres, and toilet blocks.
Caritas Bangladesh – which is supported by Cafod - worked alongside UN agencies to provide emergency support with replacement shelters, water and sanitation, food and education centres. Fr Terence Rodrigues, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chattogram which includes Cox’s Bazar, has urged the government to integrate Rohingya refugees into Bangladeshi society. More than one million Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar over several decades.
On 3 January, Pope Francis who met Rohingya refugees during his visit to Bangladesh in 2017, asked Catholics “not to forget our Rohingya brothers and sisters, who are persecuted”.
Catholics in India have praised a provincial government’s decision to include the preamble of the country’s constitution – which emphasises the country’s secular character – in the school curriculum.
The preamble calls India “a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic” committed to “justice, equality and liberty”. The communist-ruled southern state of Kerala is a the first to take this measure.
Fr Jacob G Palakkappilly, spokesman of the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council, said: “It is a wonderful decision. It should have been done a long time ago. There is no doubt this initiative will give more insight to students about our constitutional values especially the secular character amid rising intolerance and discrimination based on caste, creed, and religion.”
India has seen a rise in persecution of Muslims and Christians since the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014.
Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity left their convent in Manipur last week, after mounting violence in the north-eastern Indian state saw armed men burn three schools in the border town of Moreh in Tengnoupal district on 17 January. Three people were killed in the fighting.
The sisters “vacated their convent after bullets hit the building”, said a Church official, but “there were no casualties or injuries”. The state has sought assistance from the federal government, including security reinforcements to deal with the crisis, which originated in ethnic violence between the Meiteis and Kuki-Zo tribal peoples.
Sri Lankan Catholics killed during the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019 are to be canonised.
Announcing the news last weekend, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo said: “Those who died in churches on 21 April 2019 sacrificed their lives for what they believed. They came to church on that day because they believed in Christ. They sacrificed their lives because they loved Christ like other saints.”
The Sri Lankan terror group NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath), affiliated with Islamic State, killed 269 people in churches and luxury hotels in the attack. This included 115 Catholics, 27 of them children, killed at St Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, on the coast north of Colombo, and 50 killed in a bomb attack on St Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo.
According to a Channel 4 Dispatches programme broadcast last August, Sri Lanka’s government failed to act on advance warning of the attack from intelligence sources in India.
Three people were killed and two others badly injured by a bomb detonated outside the abandoned Catholic cathedral in the Somali capital Mogadishu.
Bishop Giorgio Bertin, who retired from the Diocese of Djibouti and as apostolic administrator of Mogadishu earlier this month, confirmed to The Tablet that a bomb “was dropped within the municipality which is just in front of our cathedral” on 16 January.
The cathedral has been abandoned since an attack in 1991 during Somalia’s civil war. The last Bishop of Mogadishu, Salvatore Colombo, was killed by insurgents while saying Mass in the cathedral in 1989.
Aid to the Church in Need said there has been “no justice” for the more than 300 people murdered in Nigeria’s Plateau State over Christmas.
The series of attacks on 30 villages also displaced thousands of people, now sheltering in church property “because they don’t have confidence in government institutions”, according to Fr Andrew Dewan of the Diocese of Pankshin. He said that attacks had continued into the New Year and few were confident that the government could stop the violence, which has also increased around the Cameroon border.
Bishops in Cameroon issued a communiqué at the end of a meeting on 6-13 January saying that fighting in the region was driven by Boko Haram militants operating out of Nigeria, though the country also faces a long-running struggle between English and French-speaking communities. The bishops urged the Cameroon authorities to take effective action against all violence.
The Georgian Orthodox Church has removed an icon from its main cathedral in Tbilisi showing Joseph Stalin meeting a Russian Orthodox saint.
The Patriarchate of Georgia said that the image needed to be “amended” as there was “insufficient evidence” that Stalin had ever met St Matrona of Moscow, a twentity-century visionary and healer canonised in the 1990s. Icons must portray “real stories”, the patriarchate said.
Many Georgians criticised the Church for accepting the icon, donated to the Holy Trinity Cathedral last year by the pro-Russia Alliance of Patriots party.
Stalin, who was born in Georgia and as a young man trained for the priesthood, purged the clergy and persecuted the Church during his rule in 1924-53. The icon depicts scenes from the life of St Matrona, and in one image portrays him blessing Stalin.
Traditionalists opposing the use of six modern stained-glass windows in the restored Notre Dame de Paris have collected over 130,000 signatures to a petition presented to the French presidency.
The windows, for side chapels along the southern wall of the cathedral, would replace nineteenth-century windows that, the petition argued, were not damaged in its 2019 fire.
The petition was launched by La Tribune de l’Art website, accusing President Emmanuel Macron of driving the modernisation of the Gothic building. “Who gave the head of state the mandate to alter a cathedral that does not belong to him, but to everyone?” the petition asked.
“Emmanuel Macron wants to put the mark of the twenty-first century on Notre-Dame de Paris. A little modesty might be best. We will not be cruel enough to remind you that this mark already exists: fire.”
French prosecutors have closed a sexual abuse investigation against the former Archbishop of Strasbourg Jean-Pierre Grallet without taking action, because the case was beyond the civil statute of limitations.
The archbishop was one of 11 serving or retired French prelates that Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort said in November 2022 were under suspicion of sexual abuse. He has publicly asked pardon for “inappropriate behaviour” with an adult woman. The Vatican began a canonical investigation after his successor, Archbishop Luc Ravel, reported this.
Archbishop Ravel was himself later forced from office following complaints about his management, with a separate canonical inquiry opened regarding his conduct.
Florists in Valencia say they have set a new Guinness record for the largest floral mantle for a statue of the Virgin Mary. The cape worn by the Valencian statue of La Virgen de Los Desamparados – Our Lady of the Forsaken – weighed an estimated 8,800lbs in 2023, covering an area of 8,600 square feet.
Juan Lluesma, president of the Artisan Guild of Florists of Valencia, said they believed the mantle was already the largest in existence, telling Europa Press: “We deserve this. There is no floral mantle like ours in the world.” Lluesma added that the mantle was “a symbol of our city and our culture, and we want to share it with the world”.
The floral cape is created out of bouquets of carnations carried by Valencians offering flowers to Our Lady.
An artist has used AI to create an image of the Virgin Mary’s face. Átila Soares da Costa Filho used extant 3D imaging of the face of Christ inspired by the face on the Shroud of Turin “as a base” for his project.
Soares de Costa told the Catholic news site Aleteia that his initial inspiration for the digital image was the face of Jesus created by the computer graphic designer, Ray Downing.
“I did various experiments with artificial intelligence software and high technology convolutional neural networks to change the gender,” he said. “Then, I used other programmes for adjustments to the face, and lastly, some manual artistic retouching on my part, in order to better define an ethnic and anthropologically feminine physiognomy from Palestine 2,000 years ago.”
Da Soares also deployed AI methods and digital photograph editing to depict a younger Mary, around the age she gave birth to Jesus. He has now released updated versions of the AI reconstructions he originally made in 2021.
Pope Francis called for world leaders meeting in the Swiss city of Davos last week “to be mindful of the moral responsibility that each of us has in the fight against poverty, the attainment of an integral development for all our brothers and sisters, and the quest for peaceful coexistence among peoples”.
He told the World Economic Forum, that in a “very troubling climate of international stability”, the meeting “provides an important opportunity for multi-stakeholder engagement to explore innovative and effective ways to build a better world”.
The general secretary of the World Council of Churches reminded the leaders that, given mounting global crises, there is an urgent need for cooperation rather than division.
The Revd Jerry Pillay said that “while some of those in attendance in Davos are themselves drivers of inequality, injustice, and division, we want to believe that many others are genuinely committed to exercising their considerable influence to promote a greater measure of justice and peace in the world”.
Monday marked the third anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which established a ban on nuclear weapons under international law. Nearly half of the world’s states are either parties or signatories to the treaty.
Christian groups joined a gathering outside the United Nations headquarters in New York to urge the US to support the TPNW.
On 27 January Pax Christi USA will hold an online forum, “Building a world without nuclear weapons: An urgent imperative”, with keynote speakers include Archbishop John Charles Wester of Santa Fe, who has called for nuclear disarmament, and Marie Dennis, senior director of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative and a former co-president of Pax Christi International.
The World Day of the Sick on 11 February will take the theme “Healing the Sick by Healing Relationships”.
In a message for the occasion, Pope Francis said: “Our lives, reflecting in the image of the Trinity, are meant to attain fulfilment through a network of relationships, friendships and love, both given and received.” He continued: “We were created to be together, not alone.”
Calling for a “therapeutic covenant” between patients and carers, the Pope observed: “To those of you who experience illness, whether temporary or chronic, I would say this: Do not be ashamed of your longing for closeness and tenderness! Do not conceal it, and never think that you are a burden on others.”
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