The Congolese army “is in complete chaos” said Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa, warning that it was losing territory to M23 rebels in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The situation in and around Goma is deteriorating day by day,” he said, as fighting intensified close to the capital of North Kivu.
The Bishop of Goma and other from surrounding dioceses reported that “insecurity has become endemic with a series of killings even in broad daylight” while the economy is “paralysed”.
They called for the establishment of a competent government and for the international community “to understand once and for all that DR Congo is neither for sale nor in a state of anarchic exploitation”.
The Vatican supported appeals by the Ethiopian bishops’ conference for immediate action on hunger and humanitarian aid for the country’s 4.4 million internally displaced people and one million refugees, who are suffering the effects of severe drought, malnutrition, and economic difficulties.
At a High-level Pledging Event in Geneva on 16 April, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, apostolic nuncio and permanent representative of the Holy See to the United Nations and other international organisations in Geneva, emphasised the urgency and scale of the need which “compels us to act with solidarity and support”.
He explained that Ethiopia faced disease outbreaks and the fifth consecutive failed rainy season, resulting in the most severe drought conditions in decades.
Fighting over disputed land along the borders of Ethiopia’s Tigray and Amhara regions which has also displaced nearly 30,000 people. “These catastrophic events have led to increased malnutrition rates,” he said. Although Catholics are a minority in Ethiopia, the Church plays an important role in providing and distributing aid to impoverished communities.
Priests in Zimbabwe have expressed concern for their safety after a series of robberies and attacks on parishes. Thieves have taken quantities of foreign currency from parish houses, and have also targeted schools.
Last year, Archbishop Alex Thomas of Bulawayo voiced alarm at the number of burglaries in his diocese, which includes the country’s second-largest city.
According to police, more than 20 parishes in Bulawayo were broken into last year by robbers armed with weapons that included machetes and iron bars. In one incident, robbers fled with a church’s sacred vessels only to abandon them after they realised they had no economic value.
More recently, a priest in the north-western Diocese of Hwange was attacked and left for dead in a robbery. Clergy have blamed Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, which has left millions of young men without employment.
Bishops appealed for peace in Mozambique as rebels renewed their offensive against government forces. “Terrorism and armed insurgency are increasing the suffering of our people,” the Mozambican bishops’ conference said in a pastoral letter.
“Violent deaths and the destruction of infrastructure have resulted in the mass displacement of people, especially women and children. We appeal for prayers for peace in our country.” They asked that the first Sunday of each month be dedicated to prayers for peace.
Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith received a petition with 50,000 signatures on the anniversary of the 2019 Easter bombings, calling for the beatification of the 171 Catholics among the 269 killed in Sri Lanka’s worst-ever terror attack. Ranjith said the Archdiocese of Colombo would present the Cause to the Vatican.
The United Nations urged Sri Lanka to bridge its “accountability deficit” and ensure justice as the country commemorated the 269 victims of its worst-ever terror attack five years ago.
The UN envoy Marc-Andre Franche told a remembrance service in Colombo last Sunday that there should be a “thorough and transparent investigation” to find those behind the Easter carnage in 2019, when Islamist bombers hit three churches and three hotels in suicide attacks.
Ranjith has accused the government of complicity in protecting those behind the jihadists. Church leaders and rights activists voiced scepticism after opposition parties promised to ensure an international probe into the bombings, ahead of a presidential election this year.
Myanmar’s military government announced last week that detained former leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been moved from prison to house arrest.
General Zaw Min Tun said the move was “for all those who need necessary precautions, especially elderly prisoners, not only for Aung San Suu Kyi”, because “the weather is extremely hot, but we are working to protect them from heatstroke”.
Suu Kyi, 78, has been detained by the Myanmar military since it overthrew her government in a 2021 coup.
The Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference has issued a new national code of conduct to improve safeguarding in the Church. The document “Integrity in our Common Mission” covers physical and emotional boundaries, responding to complaints, the use of social media, abuse in the workplace and financial ethics.
The bishops described the 32-page code as a means “of furthering the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference’s ongoing commitment to the safety of children and vulnerable people”.
At the behest of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, the code combined the contents of two earlier codes, one for clergy and religious and another for lay workers.
The bishops said the code aimed to “assist in the formation and induction of clergy and lay pastoral leaders to reflect integrity in all aspects of their lives”.
Bishop Greg Bennet, the chair of the bishops’ Commission for Professional Standards and Safeguarding, said the documents’ principles had been developed “to guide, form, strengthen and affirm those behaviours which are expected of all engaged in the ministries of the Church”.
A music festival returned this week to the Chiquitos missions in Bolivia, established by the Jesuits between 1691 and 1760, focusing on the historic encounter between Jesuits and the indigenous populations of the reductions (the settlements to which they were relocated by Spanish colonists).
Around 1,200 musicians from 15 countries were due to perform 130 free concerts in 22 venues over 19-28 April, with sponsorship from two US Jesuit universities. Boston College’s Clough’s School of Theology and Ministry backed the world premiere of the opera San Francisco Xavier in the San Xavier and Concepción missions, while Georgetown University’s Chamber Choir was to sing in five of the mission churches.
Detroit-based filmmaker and sound engineer Scott Loudon began the initiative behind the festival, which was produced by Bolivia-based La Asociación Pro Arte y Cultura, a non-profit cultural organisation that aims to promote and produce artistic initiatives especially related to the Chiquitos missions.
The Catholic Church in Cuba has offered to facilitate dialogue with “different political actors” on the island in the aftermath of protests.
Fr Ariel Suárez, deputy secretary of the Cuban Bishops’ Conference, said the bishops had “noted the pain people are in”. Referring to the thousands who took to the streets in March to protest at shortages of food, medicine, and power, he said their pain had “turned into a cry that was heard and…accepted, by all the levels of the country”.
In an interview with NBC News, Suárez said: “The bishops have called for prayer so that solutions can be found, so we can find a way out of this distressing situation, so that those in power may have the wisdom and the boldness when making decisions that will benefit people’s lives.”
He said the bishops had asked the Church “if the different political actors agree” to “offer a space for dialogue, a meeting place” between all “these different but not necessarily contradictory positions”.
He added: “We Cubans can love Cuba with different visions, with different perspectives,” urging Cubans “to put the love for Cuba and the desire to improve the life of its people…above all other differences.”
Two bishops waded into different ends of US politics this week, when Bishop Robert Gruss of Saginaw, Michigan called President Joe Biden “stupid” while Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, declared Christian nationalism incompatible with Catholic teaching.
Gruss, speaking at an event in his cathedral, said: “I don’t have any anger toward the president. I feel sorry for him. I’m not angry at him, he’s just stupid.”
Citing the president’s support for abortion rights, Gruss said the president “doesn’t understand the Catholic faith”. He added that the president’s stance made him sad because “he’s not living the life Jesus wants for him. His life could be so much more, just like ours could be if we’re living the life Jesus wants for us.”
Burbidge, meanwhile, made his comments on his podcast. “I think it’s good to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism. Of course, a good Catholic should also be a good citizen, a faithful citizen. We always say that, ‘a faithful citizen’, and that means to be patriotic of course.”
He described nationalism as “a view of one’s nation only in competition with others. It tends to emphasise devotion to the nation, to the exclusion of other devotions, including one’s faith.”
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Archbishop of Washington who is the first African-American cardinal, reflect on the perseverance of black Catholics in the US as he received the Rector’s Award from the Pontifical North American College in Rome on 11 April.
“Even in times when we weren’t respected, or understood, or honoured, we remained faithful,” Cardinal Gregory said. He said that in the nineteenth century, African Americans who had a vocation to the priesthood were sent to study in Rome and then to serve as missionaries in Africa, because they were barred from US seminaries.
The Diocese of Brooklyn reached an agreement with New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James, to appoint an independent monitor to assess the its compliance with child protection policies, and issue an annual report on the matter.
James said her office’s investigation determined “the diocese failed consistently to comply with its own policies and procedures for responding to sexual abuse”. The agreement follows a similar accord reached with the Diocese of Buffalo, New York two years ago.
Bishop Robert Brennan apologised for the Church’s failure to stop sexual abuse, saying: “While the Church should have been a sanctuary, I am deeply sorry that it was a place of trauma for the victims of clergy sexual abuse.”
The Catholic bishops of Quebec have called for a response to the huge increase in the number of people suffering food deprivation.
The bishops reported that 10 per cent of the population of Quebec sought help from food banks in 2023. They invited communities and individuals “to analyse the situation in light of the Gospel” and take action “to ensure that everyone has enough to eat”.
The bishops observed that many of those in need are also facing soaring prices for housing and other necessities, while in many cases, “having a job is not enough to feed oneself and one’s family”.
They urged “our Christian communities, which are often already committed to helping the vulnerable, to respond to the call of the hungry, because, in doing so, we will be acting for justice, as Jesus Christ taught us, in continuity with the great biblical tradition of commitment to justice.”
Cardinal Gerhard Müller compared Belgian officials to “absolutist rulers of the past” after they attempted to close a right-wing conference in Brussels where he spoke last week.
In a statement Müller, a former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the city authorities’ attempt to close the National Conservatism conference on public order grounds (which were later dismissed in court) “had unintentionally revealed their ideological relapse into absolutist state thinking”.
Bishop Joseph Bonnemain of Chur in eastern Switzerland faced criticism for attending the traditionalist funeral of his predecessor Bishop Vitus Huonder, wearing simple clerical garb as part of the congregation.
Huonder retired to a community of the schismatic Society of St Pius X (SSPX) and was buried at the group’s main seminary in Écône. The SSPX, which claims to have about 700 priests, rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
Other Swiss bishops did not attend and Bonnemain had received several messages urging him not to go, but he said he went as a simple Christian, not a concelebrant, saying: “It is not my place to judge his life and work.”
Slowly moving red patches atop a statue of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus led pilgrims to visit the village of Ostro in south-eastern Germany, believing they were witnessing a miracle of revitalised blood.
Groups prayed before the statue, which stands behind metal bars in an isolated chapel, and attracted attention on social media, until the Diocese of Dresden-Meissen disappointed them with a scientific study it had commissioned from the local university.
The patches were found to be swarms of red-bodied mites, tiny spider-like insects that were climbing up the statue to escape rising heat down below.
Statistics for 2024 showed that German alcohol sales went down 9.4 per cent this past Lent compared to the rest of the 12 months up to Easter 2024.
Sweets purchases during the fasting season were 5.6 per cent less than the average at other times, a Federal Statistics Office survey of major supermarket chains reported, and meat sales fell by 3.6 per cent.
The figures were not collected on behalf of the Church, and in fact suggested that religious traditions were losing ground to new secular trends – such as “dry January”, a tee-total month for the health-conscious, or “Veganuary”, the vegan equivalent. January saw alcohol sales fall by 26.4 per cent on the previous 11 months’ average, and meat sales by 5.1 per cent.
The Statistics Office said New Year’s resolutions might have influenced the figures, noting that sweets sales plummeted by 35.1 per cent that month.
The Italian advertising regulator has ordered the withdrawal of a commercial for crisps accused of “blasphemy”. The 30-second television advert for Amica Chips shows young, white-habited nuns receiving the Eucharist from a priest while the mother superior munches the contents of a crisp packet.
“Christ has been reduced to a potato chip: debased and vilified like 2,000 years ago,” protested the Catholic daily Avvenire. AIRT, a Catholic group that monitors Italy’s television and radio said the “outrageous” advert offended “millions of practising Catholics”.
The decision of the advertising standards authority IAP (Istituto dell’Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria) gave Amica Chips seven days to appeal.
Pope Francis will become the first reigning pontiff to visit the Venice Biennale since its foundation in 1895 on 28 April. He will visit the Vatican exhibit in the women’s prison in the Venetian island of Giudecca.
Originally a convent dating from the thirteenth century, the prison chapel’s façade is adorned by a large photograph of the nude, dusty feet of the artist Maurizio Cattelan, a reference to the Renaissance painting Lamentation of Christ by Andrea Mantegna. Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, described Cattelan’s photograph as reminiscent of the naked, dirty feet of Caravaggio’s saints.
The exhibit also includes a film featuring the actress Zoë Saldaña (star of James Cameron’s Avatar films) and prisoners in a plot concerning an inmate on the day of her release. Anti-war posters by the deceased former nun Corita Kent also feature in the exhibit.
In a message for Earth Day on 22 April, Pope Francis said: “Our generation has bequeathed many riches, but we have failed to protect the planet and we are not safeguarding peace. We are called to become artisans and caretakers of our common home, the Earth, which is falling into ruin.”
CIDSE, the network of Catholic social and environmental justice organisations, called for ethical consistency in Church investments, particularly shunning industrial mining and fossil fuels.
On 18 April the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano gave prominent front-page coverage to the climate crisis, highlighting recent torrential rain in Dubai and Pakistan, drought in Mexico and Spain, and exceptional heat in the Sahel.
It broadcast an appeal from scientists for “structural change towards a renewable energy system”, because “remaining on the path we are on will lead to catastrophic consequences”.
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