News Briefing: global

The Vatican’s chief interfaith expert has warned that dialogue with Muslims has so far produced “negligible results” and failed to prevent the threatened eradication of Christianity in the Middle East. “We’re condemned to this dialogue since the alternative would be war – but the fruits of our dialogue with Islam are barely discernible and have no impact in daily life,” said Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, chairman of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. “We meet, we observe and listen to each other – but the problem is that these small achievements don’t translate at all into law and administration, or into the lives of ordinary people. The dialogue is just too elitist … Only one thing is clear, and very dangerous – that the Middle East no longer exists,” he added. “The bridge Christians once provided between the West and the Muslim East no longer exists.”

News chief forced out
The editor-in-chief of the Catholic News Service (CNS), Tony Spence, was forced to resign last week, after conservative blogs attacked him for tweets opposing efforts to restrict lesbian and gay rights in North Carolina and Georgia. CNS is funded by the US Bishops’ Conference. “The secretary general asked for my resignation, as the conference lost confidence in my ability to lead CNS,” Spence said.

Prominent members of Germany’s governing coalition are demanding that Germany introduce a new law on Islam, modelled on the recent one introduced in Austria, which requires imams to preach in German in Germany and forbids funding from abroad for mosques. “We must make greater efforts to grapple with political Islam as at the moment it is preventing integration,” CSU general- secretary Andreas Scheuer told the German daily Die Welt. Financing mosques or Muslim kindergartens from abroad must cease, and imams must be trained in Germany “and share our basic values”, he said.

In the Czech Republic, the head of the Catholic Church has called on the Chinese president to allow religious freedom and respect human rights. At a state dinner in Prague, during Xi Jinping’s recent visit, Cardinal Dominik Duka, Archbishop of Prague, who was a dissident in communist Czechoslovakia, handed the Chinese leader a letter detailing his concerns. He also gave Xi a book on Czech poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek, whose works were banned under his country’s former communist regime.

Mass kidnap marked
Nigerians have marked the second anniversary of the kidnapping of 276 girls from their school in Chibok, northern Nigeria, by Boko Haram terrorists, noting that 219 of the girls are still missing. Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Abuja called the failure to locate the girls “a mystery that can’t be explained” and warned that even when Chibok girls escape, they are sometimes shunned by their communities and any children rejected. A memorial event took place last week at the ruins of Chibok Government Secondary School. More than 2,000 people attended, including parents of the girls, who saw footage received by CNN, supposedly showing 15 of them alive in December last year.

Anti-trafficking move
The Counter Trafficking in Persons Office (CTIP) of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference has recruited taxi drivers to help fight trafficking in South Africa. The campaign is a follow-up to “Truckers against Human Trafficking” launched in 2013. Sr Melanie O’ Connor, CTIP coordinator, led the launch of “Taxis against Human Trafficking” at a conference at the Good Shepherd Retreat Centre in Hartbeespoort, 20 miles west of Pretoria, from 12–15 April. Sr Melanie said that girls and women especially aged 14 to 23 are trafficked across South Africa’s borders in trucks or taxis. She told of a taxi driver who often noticed a woman travelling with a child to a set point but the woman was always alone on her return journey. The driver reported the incidents to the police and it was found that the woman was trafficking children.

A “slow-motion genocide” is under way in the Indonesian province of West Papua, according to a recent report from a fact-finding team of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission of the Archdiocese of Brisbane. “The Indonesians want to replace the Christian religion with Islam,” says Josephite Sr Susan Connelly, the author of the commission’s report, that documents military and police intimidation, beatings, torture, kidnapping and murder. Muslims are being radicalised in the once predominantly Christian province, and “very active” Muslim militias burn down Papuan houses. In the 1970s, ethnic Papuans made up 96 per cent of the population. Today they make up 48 per cent.

Church rebuilding
A joint Catholic-Russian Orthodox delegation has visited Lebanon and Syria to work out how to cooperate in rebuilding destroyed churches, in line with joint pledges by Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill during their historic February meeting in Havana. “This visit provided a concrete example of the understanding of unity Francis spoke about after his meeting with Kirill in Havana,” said Archbishop Paolo Pezzi, the head of Russia’s Moscow-based Catholic Church after co-leading the two-day tour of Christian organisations in Beirut and Damascus.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, prayed with Robert Mugabe for the future of Zimbabwe this week, and discussed the “mistakes that have been made” in Zimbabwe’s past when he met the president in Harare. The archbishop insisted that the private occasion was not political and focused on church affairs. “It was a pastoral meeting. We talked about the affairs of the Church and the future in Zimbabwe,” the archbishop told national daily The Herald.

A two-day conference at the Vatican entitled “Centesimus Annus 25 Years Later” hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, featured presentations by presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Evo Morales of Bolivia, and an intervention from Senator Bernie Sanders, currently seeking the Democratic nomination for the US presidency. The symposium focussed on economic, political and cultural changes in the 25 years since Pope St John Paul II released the encyclical, and on how Catholic Social Teaching has engaged the world.

Compiled by James Roberts