French court summons Ladaria
A French criminal court has summoned a Vatican prefect, a French cardinal and two bishops to appear before it next April on suspicion of non-denunciation of a priest who has admitted to serial sexual abuse of children.
The summons from the court at Lyons named Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer (pictured), Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyons, Philippe Barbarin, two bishops, a priest and two lay employees of the Archdiocese of Lyons.
The victims’ group that brought the suit alleges that the senior clerics all knew of the abuse by Fr Bernard Preynat, who is under judicial investigation in four cases of abusing boy scouts between 1986 and 1991. He has admitted guilt and has said his superiors knew of his activity.
Lawyers for the victims say Archbishop Ladaria had advised Cardinal Barbarin by letter to discipline Preynat, but avoid public scandal. At the time, he was secretary of the CDF, the Vatican department that handles clerical sexual abuse cases. A judicial investigation into the case was dropped last year for lack of evidence. However, victims pursued it and convinced the court to issue the summons.
A lawyer for Cardinal Barbarin denounced the procedure and hinted that the archbishop might not attend the trial. Archbishop Ladaria, a Spanish Jesuit, was not represented at the hearing to set the date of 4-6 April 2018. This was because prosecutors had not informed him in time.
For the first time in decades, a Christian legislator has been chosen as the Speaker of Parliament in predominantly Muslim Syria. Hammudeh Sabbagh, a 58-year-old Syriac Orthodox Christian from Hasakeh province in north-east Syria, was elected to the post on 28 September. Sabbagh – the first Christian Speaker since Fares el-Khoury, who served several times until 1949 – is a graduate in law and a member of President Bashar al-Assad’s Baath party.
Jailed Christian in line for prize
Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian mother of five who has spent seven years in prison on death row after being convicted of blasphemy, has been nominated for the European Union’s prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
It is awarded to individuals or groups who have defended fundamental human rights. The nomination renews attention to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. The winner of the £45,000 prize will be announced in December in Strasbourg, France.
In 2009, Muslim co-workers from Ms Bibi’s village near Lahore accused her of blasphemy for praising Jesus Christ and for allegedly insulting Muhammad. It followed an argument in the fields when other women grew angry with her for drinking water from the same cup as them, saying that as a Christian, she was “unclean”. Ms Bibi was found guilty and sentenced to death in November 2010. Several appeals have since followed without resolution.
The Ministry of Religious Affairs and Culture in Myanmar has submitted an initial draft of a law against hate speech for debate in the country’s parliament.
A spokesperson for the ministry noted that while free speech should permit criticism, there had been recent cases involving defamation related to race and religion.
Followers of extremist Buddhist groups, such as the “Ma Ba Tha” movement, in political speeches and online posts have targeted Muslims, particularly Rohingya Muslims.
Meanwhile, Catholic bishops visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh last week to see the conditions of more than 430,000 Rohingya who have fled there from Myanmar’s Rakhine state since late August. They called for greater “humanity and solidarity” and offered £9,000 through Caritas for the relief effort.
Gay couple refused blessing
The Bishop of Münster, Felix Genn, has refused to give his permission for a gay partnership to receive a church blessing.
The Mayor of Emmerich am Rhein, Peter Hinze, and his partner had their partnership converted into a marriage on 1 October, the day that same-sex marriage became legal in Germany. They wanted to obtain a church blessing “for loving couples” in a local parish church in Emmerich, but the bishop would not allow the parish priest to bless the couple.
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has said that Christians are an essential part of Iraqi society and must be part of the process of peace and reconciliation. Speaking in Rome at a conference on rebuilding Christian villages on the Plains of Nineveh that Islamic State destroyed in 2014, he said one of the greatest challenges in Iraq is “to restore to the Christian communities the environment of a normal life”. The rebuilding of houses and villages, he said, “is the first and fundamental condition for the return of Christians to their own lands.”
The conference was organised by Aid to the Church in Need.
Woelki defends NFL protest
In his “Thought for Sunday” on 1 October, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, Archbishop of Cologne, defended the US NFL players who have knelt down during the national anthem at American football games in protest against what they say is racial injustice and police violence in the country. Cardinal Woelki criticised US President Donald Trump’s call for the clubs to fire the protesting players.
Purge victims remembered
Russia’s Orthodox Church has unveiled the first monument to victims of Stalin’s 1937-8 Great Purge, at a site where more than 20,000 people were shot and buried in unmarked pits.
“This memorial is dedicated to victims of repression by the NKVD police,” the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate said. “It symbolically uncovers the firing moat, where visitors will stand on the same level as those lying in the graves.”
Dedicated by the head of the Church’s Council for New Martyrs and Confessors, Metropolitan Juvenaly Poyarkov, the “Garden of Remembrance” features a 300-metre granite plinth inscribed with 20,762 names. It includes parts of an apple orchard that the KGB planted in the 1970s to prevent the future exhumation of bodies at Butovo Firing Range, near Moscow.
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