News Briefing: global

Nun honoured
An 85-year-old nun who has spent more than 50 years helping the Northern Territory’s Tiwi people has been named Senior Australian of the Year at a ceremony at Parliament House Canberra, at which the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, presented her with the award. Sr Anne Gardiner (above) said she accepted the award on behalf of her fellow Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and of the Tiwi people. She first went to live among the Tiwi at Bathurst Island, near Darwin, in 1953. She used her acceptance speech to call for greater recognition of Australia’s indigenous peoples.

After witnessing the arrival of President Adama Barrow in Gambia’s capital, Banjul, on 26 January, to assume power days after his predecessor, Yahya Jammeh, finally stepped down after losing December’s elections, Bishop Robert Patrick Ellison of Banjul said: “The crisis is over, but we need help.” He called for more US and European Union aid and for measures to restore the tourist industry in Gambia.

The ongoing economic crisis and political polarisation in Venezuela is costing thousands of lives, Archbishop Ubaldo Ramón Santana Sequera of Maracaibo said. “There is already a bloodbath of considerable proportions in Venezuela,” he said last week, pointing to figures of some 30,000 murders a year. “If we fail to find a peaceful way to understand each other, the number could increase,” he added. As well as violence and riots caused by food shortages, the archbishop reported soaring inflation, growing poverty and malnutrition, especially among children. Venezuela’s opposition has been holding street protests calling for an end to the rule of the unpopular President, Nicholas Maduro.

The Chinese Government over the past year has increasingly pressurised Christianity in the country to conform to the Communist Party’s agenda, according to a recent report by a watchdog that monitors religious freedom in China. China Aid, a non-governmental organisation that documents abuses against Christian churches, pastors, activists and human rights lawyers, said in its report that throughout 2016 the Government of President Xi Jinping had engaged in activities to force all religions “to surrender to the authority and leadership of the Chinese Community Party”.

Lay missionary murdered
A Polish lay missionary has been murdered during an attack on a childcare centre run by Polish nuns in Cochabamba, central Bolivia. Helena Kmiec, 26, who had started work at the centre only weeks earlier, died of multiple stab wounds after the attack on the night of 24 January. Police arrested several suspects and suggested robbery was the motive. Ms Kmiec was a volunteer at last year’s World Youth Day in Krakow.

An archbishop and a Catholic contingent have joined Hindus in India’s Madhya Pradesh state on a march to try and save the Narmada river from pollution that is turning its water toxic. Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal recently walked a stretch of the “Protect Narmada March”, which will cover the 1,000-km path of the river through the state and end in May. The river, a major water source in Madhya Pradesh, is heavily polluted from factory waste, sewage, animal carcases and the ashes of burnt bodies.

A delegation of the Chaldean Church, led by Patriarch Raphael Louis Sako (above), visited Iraq’s Nineveh Plains last week and reported that committees have been set up and the first funds allocated to rebuild churches and homes destroyed by Islamists. The largely Christian community was driven out by Islamic State between June and August 2014. In Telkaif, the Chaldean Patriarch led prayers in the church of the Sacred Heart for peace and the prompt return of refugees to their homes.

The Czech President, Milos Zeman, has invited the Pope to visit his country for the 75th anniversary of the Lidice massacre, carried out by the occupying Germans. Nazi paramilitary police destroyed Lidice and executed 173 male villagers at a nearby farm on 10 June 1942 in retaliation for the killing a fortnight earlier by Czech resistance fighters of a leading Nazi official, Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia.

Japan is to submit a proposal to add several places linked to the history of Japan’s persecuted Christians to Unesco’s list of cultural World Heritage sites. The 12 Christian sites include the Oura Church in Nagasaki Prefecture, a national treasure and the oldest existing church in the country, and Sakitsu village, where hidden Christians lived, in Amakusa, Kumamoto Prefecture.

Mental health appeal
The commission representing Europe’s Catholic bishops has urged better care and improved dignity for mental health sufferers, and urged the Church to do more to resist their social exclusion. “Christian ethical thought and Catholic social teaching have many resources to bring to reflection on mental health and wellbeing,” the Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the EU (Comece), said in a report.

Russia’s minority Catholic Church has vowed not to be drawn into planned state celebrations of the 1917 revolution despite wide support among local Catholics for the autocratic policies of President Vladimir Putin. “Our Catholic faithful hold various political views – but the Church’s role is to make people morally sensitive, not to promote any political option,” said Mgr Igor Kovalevsky, secretary-general of Russia’s Bishops’ Conference. In a Tablet interview, he said a church committee would meet to discuss the anniversaries, but added that most Catholics would prefer to commemorate the 1917 Marian apparitions at Fatima, which urged Russia’s conversion, rather than a revolution that heralded eight decades of savage repression of Christian communities.

Addiction to the drug methamphetamine is one of Western Australia’s biggest issues ahead of the March state election, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth told The West Australian newspaper. “Society is being cut loose from its moorings,” he said. “Society is strongest when it has strong values that are pretty well recognised, accepted and adhered to by the vast majority.”