Iraqi Christians have celebrated the inauguration of a recently restored Chaldean Catholic Church in Mosul. Around 300 attended Mass in the 80-year-old church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on 5 April. The main celebrant was Cardinal Raphael Sako, patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church, who said, “This is our country and our land, and we are here to stay even if there aren’t many of us left.” Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province and home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, was ruled by Islamic State between 2014 and 2017, forcing Christians to flee. The Chaldean church had all marks of Christianity removed.
“No one should line up to receive help when we are not at war” said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, listing evils Nigeria must tackle as food deficit, corruption, nepotism and insecurity. Bishop Kukah said in his Easter message, “Let us return our people to their farms and develop an agricultural plan to bring our country back on the path of honour and human dignity.” People have abandoned fields where they practiced subsistence agriculture because of insecurity, climate changes that cause droughts and floods and poor investment in the agricultural sector.
Zimbabwe’s vice president Constantine Chiwenga appeared as a special guest at the St. Joseph’s men’s guild national congress in Bulawayo on Saturday. “As fathers in our families, we are heads of our households and have responsibilities to fend for, care, love and be available for our families,” Chiwenga said. He urged Catholic men to lead by example, adding “I urge you to take responsibility for the education of our children, both in terms of the resources they need and what they learn.” Churches play an important role “in accelerating our national development agenda” and are “a critical partner in our nation,” President Emmerson Mnangagwa told an Easter weekend festival in Masvingo of the Zion Christian Church. Government ministers, legislators, traditional leaders and senior Government officials were among more than 150 000 people attending.
Catholic bishops have called on Church-run schools in India to promote religious harmony after some have faced hostility from Hindu groups over alleged religious conversions. “We need to respect all faith traditions without discrimination,” the bishops said in guidelines issued to schools on 1 April. Fr Maria Charles, secretary of the Office of Education and Culture of the Bishops’ Conference of India, said, “We plan to promote inclusiveness in our academic institutions.” The Church runs more than 50,000 educational institutions, including schools and 400 colleges, six universities and six medical schools. Tensions have been raised with Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking a third consecutive term in office in the forthcoming general election.
Pope Francis sent condolences to the president of the Chinese Regional Bishops’ Conference of Taiwan after an earthquake hit Taiwan Island on 3 April. He prayed for at least 12 people who had died, the injured and all those displaced, as well as for the emergency personnel engaged in recovery efforts, said a telegram sent to Bishop John Baptist Lee Keh-mien of Hsinchu, conference president. Bishop Philip Huang Chao-ming of Hwalien said the violent tremors caused disasters in several counties and cities, particularly in Hwalien, which suffered the most damage. He reported that parishes were supporting recovery work.
A Burmese nun has reported that Myanmar has been “reduced to hunger by war”. Sr Regina, a Burmese member of the Sisters of Repair, speaking to missionaries meeting in Milan, said: “Without humanitarian aid, children and the elderly are suffering in the forests because the roads are blocked by the military. Conscription is used to provide human shields to force the rebels to kill their own countrymen. Our sisters remain close to the people, walking with them, even in tears, amid the dangers and the pain.” In a deteriorating situation three years after Myanmar’s military coup, “planes are mercilessly bombing refugee camps, schools, hospitals, shops, and churches, wherever people try to take refuge,” said Sr Regina. She said: “Hungry people are looting shops and everyone is living in fear, worried about surviving. Many communities, especially their children and elderly folks, are suffering because they have been forced to abandon their homes and flee into the forest, to remote places with no drinking water, no food, where torrential rains and winds prevent them from sleeping.” She reported that many sisters and priests have chosen to live alongside the faithful in refugee camps: “Our country is in great need of healing. It needs peace and justice. And for Myanmar to have a future of peace, I ask you, please pray for us.”
Catholic Bishops have called on the Philippines government to protect the indigenous Ati communities on the scenic island of Boracay after private security forces from property developers fenced off their ancestral land for tourist use. “The Ati people have been stewards of the land for generations,” said Bishop Jose Colin Bagaforo of Kidapawan, president of Caritas Philippines, which supports the Ati cause. “Their right to land is linked to the rights of indigenous peoples and we call on all parties to respect them.”
Christian leaders in Nepal have expressed dismay after a court ordered four Nepali Christians to face trial for allegedly engaging in forced religious conversion in a district bordering India. The four Nepali and seven Australian Christians were detained last month and spent 24 days in police custody after they were accused of proselytising and carrying Bibles and other religious documents in the Hindu-majority nation. The Australians were deported. B.P. Khanal, inter-faith coordinator of the ecumenical Nepal Christian Society, said it was “a big setback” that was influenced by “intensifying anti-Christian bias among public and government bodies”.
The world's oldest man has died two weeks before his 115th birthday. Venezuelan Juan Vicente Pérez Mora attributed his longevity in part to his strong Catholic faith and love for God. He prayed the Rosary twice daily. He told Guinness World Records in 2022 that the secret was, “to work hard, rest on holidays, go to bed early, drink a glass of aguardiente [a sugar-based liquor] every day, and always carry God in your heart.” The new oldest man is British. John Alfred Tinniswood, aged 111, credits his longevity to a diet of fish and chips.
The Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union was due to hold an online conference on Religious Heritage on 11 April, saying churches are “an overlooked driver for a more sustainable and inclusive society”. Organised in the context of the New European Bauhaus Festival 2024, the event was to showcase innovative projects which foster religious heritage sites adapting to climate change challenges, becoming more environmentally-friendly and connecting local communities to these sites to secure their future.
The German city of Trier has stopped an annual compensation to five inner-city Catholic parishes after 435 years but will still have to pay the sum to needy causes. The city burned at the stake its richest man, Dietrich Flade, as a wizard in 1589. As Flade had lent the city a hefty sum, public coffers had to pay the annual interest on it “to improve priests’ salaries”. Amounting to €362.50 today, the parishes have long given the money to charity. A mutual agreement means the city will stop compensating the parishes, but the sum must still be paid, now directly, to charities in future.
Dutch Cardinal Willem Eijk, tasked by Pope Francis to conduct a study into gender theory, has said Catholics should “liberate people from the straitjacket of current public opinion”. This applied especially to “strange ideas such as the LGBT+ theory”, he said according to the Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad. The cardinal’s comments met a mixed reception at a meeting of parishes discussing outreach to non-believers. Some of the 850 participants criticised this approach as unwelcoming. Eijk said today’s society “sees Christians as crazies, as strange people with a strange mental state who have lost their way”, unlike the “truly Christian culture” the Netherlands had until the early 1960s.
Pope Francis has described the work of the Red Cross as a “visible sign that fraternity is possible”. Addressing 6,000 Italian Red Cross volunteers on 6 April, he said: “If the person is put at the centre, we can dialogue, work together for the common good, going beyond divisions, breaking down the walls of enmity, overcoming the logic of interest and power that blind and make the other an enemy.” The Italian Red Cross was celebrating the 160th anniversary of its foundation in 1864, a year after the International Red Cross was founded in Geneva, Switzerland.
Fresh statistics from the Vatican reveal Catholic baptisms have increased by 1 per cent worldwide while numbers of priests are declining. According to the 2024 Pontifical Yearbook and 2022 Statistical Yearbook of the Church, by 2022, there were 1,390 billion baptised Catholics worldwide, as opposed to 1,376 billion in 2021. In Africa, home to the largest increase, numbers of baptised Catholics rose by 3 per cent from 265 to 273 million. In Europe, the figure for the baptised is 286 million, as it was in 2021. In 2022, the number of priests worldwide decreased by 142 to 407, 730, rose by 3.2 per cent in Africa, while decreasing by 1.7 per cent in Europe.
A judge in north-eastern Argentina has ruled that 20 cloistered nuns are victims of gender-based violence from senior clergy. Carolina Cáceres decreed the Discalced Carmelites of San Bernardo convent in Salta had suffered “acts of gender violence religiously, physically, psychologically and economically for more than 20 years”. She ordered the Bishop of Salta, Mario Cargnello, the bishop emeritus, Martín de Elizalde and other clergy including a priest who had allegedly told the nuns during homilies that they were “disobedient and idolatrous” to receive six months of psychological treatment and training in gender awareness and gender-based violence.
Twenty-seven preachers and theologians from North America, Europe and Asia have submitted a proposal to US bishops and the Synod of Synodality in Rome for a change in Canon Law to allow qualified lay preachers to preach the homily at Mass to “reflect a synodal Church more fully”. The synodal symposium titled “The Pastoral Charge for Lay Catholic Eucharistic Preaching in the Catholic Church” that took place on March 11-14 was hosted by Father Gregory Heillie, OP of the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis. It said that the Church should expand the instituted ministries of lector and catechist and commission a more extensive and diverse range of qualified lay preachers to preach the Word of God at the Eucharist.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a longtime auxiliary bishop of Detroit and champion of social justice causes, died April 4 at the age of 94. He was part of the drafting committee for the bishops’ peace pastoral in 1983, although he later claimed to regret endorsing the text which permitted the possession of nuclear armaments for deterrent purposes. Gumbleton also came to embrace calls for internal church reform as well, including advocacy for greater inclusion of gay and lesbian Catholics. He was a founding member of Pax Christi USA and remained dedicated to pacifism all his life.
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