News Briefing: Church in the World

Archbishop J. Michael Miller offered his condolences to Canada’s Filipino population after an attack killed at least 11 people at a heritage festival in Vancouver. A 30-year-old man identified as Kai-Ji Adam Lo was arrested on 26 April after a car drove into crowds attending the Lapu-Lapu festival on a city street, celebrating Filipino culture. 

“What should have been a joyful gathering to honour Filipino heritage has been overshadowed by sorrow and shock,” said Archbishop Miller, who headed the Archdiocese of Vancouver until his retirement in February.

“The Filipino community is a vibrant and faith-filled part of our archdiocese.  In moments like this, your spirit of hope, resilience, and deep trust in God’s providence shines even amid darkness.”

The Philippines became the first country worldwide to consecrate itself to the divine mercy of Jesus during Masses on Divine Mercy Sunday.

“This is remarkable, this is really unprecedented,” said Fr James Cervantes MIC. “Never has this been done before in the history of the world – a country consecrating themselves to the divine mercy.” His congregation, the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, are devoted to the message of divine mercy.  

“I believe the bishops are being inspired by the Holy Spirit to lead our country to holiness,” he said, after the bishops’ conference approved his request for the national consecration as part of the 2025 Jubilee. In 2016, bishops in Africa consecrated the continent to the Divine Mercy at a liturgy in Rwanda, but the Philippines is the first individual nation to do so.

Bishop Thomas Mathew Kuttimackal of Indore led the funeral on 24 April of Sushil Nathaniel, an Indian tourist killed alongside 25 others by terrorist gunmen in an attack in Kashmir two days earlier. He was the only Christian victim, and was described the bishop as a “double martyr who laid his life for the nation and for the Catholic faith”.  

Troops from India and Pakistan continued to exchange fire in disputed Kashmir, following allegations that Islamabad had sponsored the act of “cross-border terrorism”. India’s Catholic bishops condemned the attack and appealed for peace. “It is high time for us to choose the path of love, compassion, and understanding,” they said in a statement. 

Both Indian and Pakistani governments claim control of Muslim-majority Kashmir, which has been divided between them since 1947, and rebel groups have fought an insurgency in Indian-controlled territory since 1989. Last week India put the critical Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and sealed its land border with Pakistan, while Islamabad closed its airspace to Indian airlines. The UN urged both nations to show “maximum restraint”.

The Archbishop of Toamasina Cardinal Désiré Tzarahazana issued a plea for a deeper, more authentic faith in Madagascar to help address growing poverty, corruption and insecurity. Speaking ahead of his departure for Rome following the death of Pope Francis, he said the Church must lead by example to help bring about societal change.  

The cardinal told Aid to the Church in Need that although Madagascan churches are full, Christianity is “routine” rather than “conviction” for many of the Catholics who make up a quarter of the population. He said it was “essential to give a good intellectual and spiritual formation to seminarians, so that the honour associated with being a priest does not spoil them”. He praised lay catechists who “serve the Church devotedly, even as volunteers”. 

Last November, the Madagascan bishops called on the country’s government to prioritise the provision of basic services to citizens, particularly water, electricity, education and security.

South African bishops called for reforms in the country’s alcohol sector to address its “harmful relationship with alcohol, characterised by high levels of binge drinking, poor regulation, and devastating social consequences”. They made the appeal as the country observed April as Alcohol Awareness Month, with campaigners blaming alcohol for high levels of fatal road accidents, gender-based violence, femicide and a host of wider problems.  

“Research has clearly shown a strong link between alcohol abuse and gender-based violence and crime in general,” said Bishop Thulani Mbuyisa of Mariannhill, in a message to mark April as an opportunity to reflect on the country’s relationship with alcohol. “Moreover, we need to change our behaviour. But there’s also a need to review and reform our current laws. We must question the ease of access to alcohol even for underage youth. This is a huge challenge in our country.”

Bishop Paul Lontsie-Keune of Bafoussam, in Cameroon’s West Region, warned voters not to make an error in their choice for president in the election later this year. Cameroonians are scheduled to vote in October, with the country’s 92-year-old President Paul Biya expected to seek an eighth mandate.  

Addressing thousands of Christians at a pilgrimage at the Our Lady of Maria Sanctuary in Douelong, Bamougoum, the bishop called on them to register and vote as part of their Christian duty. He warned that choosing the wrong candidate could lead to a lifetime of regret, and urged voters to resist all forms of intimidation and attempts at vote-buying, and to vote their consciences.  

Many bishops have urged President Biya to step aside, but with the likelihood the president will seek another mandate many have encouraged Christians to vote for a candidate with quite different characteristics. In a recent pastoral letter, the Cameroonian bishops talked about the need to elect someone who still has the energy to travel to all parts of the country – something the frail Biya cannot do.

The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda signed an agreement to respect each other’s sovereignty and to produce a draft peace deal. It was signed by the two countries’ foreign ministers in Washington on 25 April, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio present. 

This was the latest truce since rebels in eastern DR Congo launched a major offensive in January, during which around 7,000 people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced as the forces of the M23 Movement seized swathes of mineral-rich territory in eastern DR Congo. The Rwandan government has denied backing the rebels despite UN reports of its troops participation in the offensive. The government in Kinshasa appealed to the US to mediate in exchange for access to minerals. 

Two days before the agreement, commenting on the death of Pope Francis, Bishop Melchisedec Sikuli Paluku of Butembo-Beni in DR Congo recalled Pope Francis’ visit in 2023 where he called on the nation’s leaders to foster justice and peace and thanked the Congolese bishops for always including a social dimension in their statements.

Members of the Russian parliament debated the definition of “satanism” as part of wider legislation to protect the country from the “destruction of its traditional confessions”. Parliamentarians in the Duma said satanism was comparable both to LGBT “ideology” and Nazism as a threat to society. 

Nikolai Burlyaev said traditional values were the target of satanists pursuing civilisational collapse. The debate, hosted by the Duma Committee on Civil Society, Public and Religious Associations, prompted plans to amend several laws – including freedom of conscience legislation – to combat satanism. 

The chairman of the State Duma Defence Committee Andrei Kartapolov framed the invasion of Ukraine as a fight against satanism, adding that hybrid “information and ideological” operations by the West against Russia also represent a form of satanism. “We recognised the LGBT ideology as inappropriate and adopted laws that do not allow it to be spread. Satanism is no better. It is worse, it is more aggressive,” he said.

More than a thousand people from across the world gathered at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in northern Germany last weekend to mark the eightieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation by British troops in April 1945. They found 13,000 unburied corpses and a further 60,000 emaciated and diseased survivors. 

Representatives of victims’ associations and the military took part in a ceremony alongside the UK’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. An estimated that 20,000 prisoners of war and at least 52,000 concentration camp prisoners died there, including Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist. The ceremony included reflections from survivors and the laying of wreaths. The UK’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis read a psalm.  

Angela Rayner reflected that “walking through Bergen-Belsen this morning, I felt deeply the stillness, the silence and the weight of one of the darkest chapters in human history”. There was a separate ceremony at the Jewish memorial.

Humorous TikTok videos of life inside a Benedictine convent in Saxony proved surprisingly popular, with none of the negative responses the initiators expected. Instead, said the Diocese of Osnabrück’s social media manager Urs von Wulfen, they are getting a million clicks when nuns answer viewer’s questions about life behind the walls.  

“People find this life fascinating, because it’s a provocation,” said Wulfen, a deacon who sometimes dances in videos in clerical garb, speaking to the Archdiocese of Cologne’s domradio.de.  

“Can you have a cell phone? Are you allowed out of the convent? Can you sometimes put on different clothes? Do you have vacation?” were typical questions, he said. The nuns answer even clueless questions about the cloistered life with humour, he added. “People don’t think that nuns can be like that,” he said. “They ask all sorts of questions about life in a monastery.”  

Wulfen said the Church should better understand the culture that young people live in if it want to attract them. “If people make funny videos there, we have to go along with it to a certain extent,” he said. “We get very little hate in the comments – at least when it comes to the nuns,” Wulfen noted. “The situation is different for the Catholic Church when it comes to other topics.”

A documentary following a group of American teenagers on a “phone-free” pilgrimage to Italy was released last week. Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality, directed by Christian Surtz, broadcast in cinemas in the US on what was due to be the date of Acutis’ canonisation by Pope Francis during the Jubilee of Young People. After the death of Pope Franics, the Congregation of Cardinals postponed all schedule canonisations and beatifications sine die.

Arouns 85,000 young Spaniards and families prayed for the late Pope last Saturday at a “Resurrection” music festival in Madrid. The event was organised by the Asociación Católica de Propagandistas (ACP), the Catholic Propagandists’ Association.

A message sent by the Pope to the festival before his death was read aloud to applause and cries of festival goers declaring “This is the youth of the Pope”. In the message, accompanied by an apostolic blessing, Francis said: “I exhort you to make music an invitation for believers and all people of good will to encounter Christ, the hope that never lets us down.”  

A survey by the national Spanish pollsters CIS found the number of Spaniards describing themselves as Catholic has risen five percentage points to 37 per cent, for the first increase since 1994.

The QS Top Universities report ranked the University of Notre Dame, Indiana as the top theology department in the world. The school – the largest private university in the United States – has won the award four of the past six years, and again beat the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge and Duke for the top honour. 

In addition to being recognised by scholars for its research, more than 800 students at Notre Dame select theology as either a major or minor field of study. The only two other Catholic universities to make the top 15 in the ratings were the Jesuit-run Boston College and KU Leuven in Belgium.

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