News Briefing: global

Francis meets mayor
Pope Francis had a private meeting in the Vatican on Friday last week with Rome’s new mayor, Virginia Raggi, of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. The 37-year- old lawyer (above) is the youngest person to head Rome’s City Council, and the Eternal City’s first female mayor.

China’s Catholics in Seoul
Catholic media from China and South Korea recently co-hosted an international symposium at the Franciscan Education Centre in Seoul on the use of media for evangelisation. Around 150 people, including priests from both countries, religious and lay people, attended the event on 25 June, titled “Evangelisation of Asia through Church media”. Archbishop Thaddeus Cho Hwan-kil of Daegu thanked the two organisers, the Catholic Times of Korea and the China-based Faith Press. The president of the Catholic Times, Fr Pius Yi Ki-sso, said the two media organisations have decided to cooperate for the evangelisation of mainland China and Asia. Faith Press director Fr Joseph Li Rongpin urged the sharing of church information via the internet. Faith Press, based in Hebei province’s capital, Shijiazhuang, prints the largest-circulation Catholic newspaper in China.
 
Aid for refugees
Catholic dioceses and organisations worldwide raised US$150 million (£113m) over 2014-15 to assist millions of people affected by the humanitarian crisis in Syria and Iraq, according to the Holy See Press Office. More than US$30m was allocated for food aid, US$25m for non-food provisions, US$25m for education, US$16m for health care, and US$10m for housing. The war in Syria has claimed the lives of over 250,000 people, half of whom are believed to be civilians. More than 10 million Syrians have fled their homes, including 1.9 million to Turkey, 1.1 million to Lebanon, and 600,000 to Jordan. Last week, Maronite Patriarch Mar Bechara Peter Cardinal Rai reflected that the huge number of Syrian refugees  in Lebanon threatens to upset the balance and identity of the Lebanese nation. He called for a lasting peace and the gradual repatriation of refugees to their home countries.

A Coptic Orthodox priest has been killed “in a hail of bullets” outside a church in the north of Egypt’s volatile Sinai Peninsula, in an attack claimed by the Egyptian branch of the Islamic State. Raphael Moussa, 46, was shot dead in the North Sinai capital of El-Arish on 30 June, for “combating Islam”.

The Church hierarchy in Argentina has declared it will assist a police investigation into a corruption scandal engulfing the country. The bishops’ conference said it would do everything possible to “clarify the truth” about an incident last month involving a former government minister and the hiding of US$9 million in cash at a convent. Jose Lopez, who was public works minister in the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was arrested outside Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima monastery after he was seen throwing plastic bags over the wall. The Church had since sought to distance itself from the scandal but La Nacion newspaper reported that the bishops had decided to make a statement this week after it emerged that the monastery is the former home of Bishop Ruben Di Monte who had close ties to the Kirchner government.

Philippines modus vivendi  
As Rodrigo Duterte began his six-year term as President of The Philippines on 30 June, the President of the country’s Catholic bishops’ conference promised church support and hoped that Duterte would not see the Church as an enemy despite differences. Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan said: “We will offer our critique and denounce error, but kindly look at us not as enemies but as brethren and friends wishing politics to succeed.” Manila Auxiliary, Bishop Broderick Pabillo, called on Catholics to allow Duterte to fulfil his promises “within the parameters of the law”. Duterte said last week he will promote artificial birth control. He supports capital punishment and citizens’ vigilantism.
 
State of fear
“We Christians can feel the dangers,” said Bangladesh’s Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies Fr Dilip Costa, a seminary teacher in Dhaka, after a terrorist siege in the capital on 1 July that left 20 people dead, most of them foreigners. “All minorities live in a state of fear and we do not know where this precarious situation will lead the nation,” said Fr Costa. In the 11-hour siege in a Dhaka bakery, each hostage was asked to recite from the Qu’ran and those who failed to do so were tortured and hacked to death by six young attackers from affluent Bangladeshi families.  

The head of the breakaway traditionalist Society St Pius X (SSPX), Bernard Fellay, has accused Pope Francis of causing doctrinal confusion in the Catholic Church. “In the great and painful confusion which unfortunately prevails in the Church today, the errors which have crept into church teaching must be pointed to quite clearly,” Fellay said on the Feast of St Peter and Paul on 29 June at the SSPX headquarters at Econe. These errors were being supported by a “great many priests up to and including the Pope himself”, he alleged. The SSPX “has only one desire: faithfully to bring the light of the bi-millennial Tradition, which shows the only route to follow in this age of darkness in which the cult of man replaces the worship of God, in society as in the Church”, he said. Pope Francis had expressed the view that Fellay was a “man with whom one could talk”.

Social justice on wheels
The “Nuns on the Bus” kick off their fifth annual US tour next week, highlighting social justice issues by visiting agencies run by religious women in the Midwest and Northeast. Sr Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, the advocacy group of religious women that sponsors the tour, will take part along with 10 other religious women, visiting 22 cities in 13 states. They will highlight the plight of those who “fall through the cracks of the modern economy”. This year, the tour will travel through Cleveland, Ohio, when that city hosts the Republican National Convention and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which hosts the Democrats at the month’s end.

Pope Francis has appointed Msgr Georg Bätzing, 55, the vicar-general of Trier, as Bishop of Limburg in Germany. In March 2014 the then Bishop, Tebartz-van Elst, had to step down after spending 31 million euros on the bishops’ palace.

Compiled by James Roberts