Clare Dixon (pictured), the head of Cafod’s Latin America programmes, was last week awarded the José Simeón Cañas Medal for Extraordinary Merit at the Jesuit Central American University (UCA), El Salvador, in recognition of her work in support of the people, the Church and the Society of Jesus in Central America – first in her Cafod role and secondly in her role as a founder trustee and secretary of the Archbishop Romero Trust for over 12 years.
The bishops of Africa and Europe affirmed the interdependence of the two continents ahead of this week’s EU-Africa summit in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. “Africa and Europe share common roots [since] the earliest days of human history. A long-term partnership, which corrects economic and social imbalances, summons us into the future,” the Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (Comece) said in a joint statement with the Symposium of African Episcopal Conferences (Secam). It is the responsibility of political leaders, they said, to ensure that migrants are treated with dignity and protected against criminal exploitation.
Pell lawyers seek documents
Lawyers for Cardinal George Pell have sought documents from Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Louise Milligan and Melbourne University Press about Ms Milligan’s book, Cardinal: the Rise and Fall of George Pell, as he prepares to defend himself in court against allegations of historical sexual offences.
Cardinal Pell – who has been on leave from his post as the Vatican’s Prefect for the Secretariat for the Economy since police in his native Victoria charged him in June – made the request through his lawyers at a hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on 23 November. The book was voluntarily removed from bookshops in Victoria after he was charged. Documents are being sought also from Victoria Police. Pell, 76, who has insisted that he is innocent, was not present for the hearing but is due to face a four-week committal hearing in March.
Henri Burin des Roziers, the Dominican priest and campaigner for the rights of Brazil’s landless rural workers, died suddenly on 26 November in Paris at the age of 87, his community has announced. Fr des Roziers spent almost 30 years in Brazil, seeking justice for landless workers killed by landowners in the Amazon state of Pará. In 1994 he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his defence of human rights.
Last Saturday, speaking to participants in a course on declarations of nullity in marriage cases organised by the Vatican’s Roman Rota, the main court handling marriage cases, Pope Francis ordered the world’s bishops to take on the role he allotted them two years ago. In two motu proprios, Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus, for the Latin Church, and Mitis et misericors Iesus, for the Eastern Churches, Francis overhauled the rules governing the annulment process to make it more “user-friendly”. When neither spouse contests the request for a declaration of nullity, and the evidence is clear, the diocesan bishop should personally judge the case, Francis said. However, bishops were still delegating “practically everything” to church tribunals. His instructions, he told the bishops in a fierce reprimand, were “not a choice but a duty”.
On a wing and a prayer
Australian rugby league legend Johnathan Thurston, the co-owner of an aviation company, has given a Catholic priest free air travel to celebrate Mass at a remote Aboriginal township during the tropical wet season. Brisbane’s Catholic Leader newspaper reported on 22 November that Fr Robert Greenup drives six hours once a month from Mareeba in the far north of Queensland, west of Cairns to Coen on the Cape York Peninsula, the most northerly part of the Australian continent, to celebrate Mass for the Indigenous community there. Thurston, who plays for the North Queensland Cowboys, has offered the Augustinian priest free flights on Skytrans Aviation, of which he is co-owner. Thurston, whose mother is Indigenous, is active in supporting Aboriginal communities in the region.
Vote for Sunday shopping ban
Polish parliamentarians have voted to phase out Sunday shopping within three years, after a mass petition backed by the Catholic Church and Solidarity trade union.
“Although this restriction still isn’t satisfactory, it’s a step towards regaining free Sundays,” said Fr Pawel Rytel-Adrianik, spokesman for Poland’s Bishops’ Conference. “The bishops have stressed the importance of giving Sunday back to society as a rest day and time for building family links and strengthening social ties. They’ve also underlined that this should be inseparable from the just treatment of all employees.” The law will limit Sunday trading in shopping centres and supermarkets from next March to the first and last Sundays of each month, and bar it completely from 2020.
Christians in North Iraq feel that the world has failed them, Syrian-Catholic Archbishop Boutros Moshe of Mosul underlined in several press interviews given on a visit to Hamburg. The western part of Mosul, where the Syrian-Catholic Church, which is in full union with Rome, once had many churches, had been completely destroyed during three years of Islamic State occupation. There were more than 10,000 Christians in Mosul before, he recalled, but virtually none now. Most of the remaining Christians now live in villages to the northwest or southeast of the city, while many have fled to Kurdistan. “We can only hope that the present Iraqi government will … see us Christians as equal citizens and guarantee our rights. And that is what we expect of the world community, from which we no longer want to hear fine words but at last see some action. Financial support is not decisive. Political pressure on our government is,” Archbishop Moshe said.
The diocesan phase of the sainthood cause of the Italian priest and politician Don Luigi Sturzo (pictured) formally came to a close last Friday with a ceremony in Rome’s Lateran Palace. His file now passes to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Sturzo (1871-1959) is a role model for bringing Christian values into politics. However. he faced Vatican disapproval during his career and was dismissed by some as a “clerical socialist”.
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