News Briefing: Church in the World

Bishops in South Africa condemned a massive hospital fraud in which millions of dollars were lost through “corrupt” tender processes. 

“This is not only a grave betrayal of public trust but also a direct attack on the dignity and rights of the poor who depend on public health care,” said Bishop Thulani Mbuyisa of Kokstad, who chairs the bishops’ Social Action Department. 

He was responding to a report from a Special Investigating Unit (SIU), which was launched after the assassination of a whistleblower. The report revealed that organised syndicates had defrauded the government without delivering any services. 

“While the SIU report is a necessary first step, justice will remain incomplete unless the South African Police Service and the National Prosecuting Authority act on the SIU report with urgency,” Mbuyisa said, adding that “the looting of health budgets represents not only a criminal offence but a moral failure of the highest order”.

The Justice and Peace Commission of the South African bishops’ conference joined a local campaign to address Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), in response to rising rates of alcohol consumption by women during pregnancy. It forms part of the wider “Rethink your Drink” public awareness against alcohol abuse in South Africa. 

“Some say one in nine children are affected, other research shows one in twelve, but the fact remains that South Africa has the highest recorded rate of the disorder in the world,” said Kashifa Ancer, a campaigner working with the bishops to address the crisis. 

The commission will hold public awareness workshops with its partners and lobby the government to ban alcohol advertising and restrict alcohol sales. It has also called for the provision of screening and treatment of pregnant women for alcohol-related disorders.

The Catholic Church in Kenya replaced its altar wine after the previous brand, produced by a local manufacturer, became widely available in bars, hotels and shops. The new brand, manufactured in South Africa and labelled “Mass Wine”, was introduced by the bishops’ conference last week, with the instruction that priests used no other wine for Masses.  

Archbishop Anthony Muheria of Nyeri reported that the new wine “is imported and owned by Kenya’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference and only distributed to the dioceses”. The label displays the conference’s coat of arms. It was used for the first time on 4 October at a Mass with nearly 60,000 people marking the National Prayer Day at the Subukia National Marian Shrine in Nakuru.

The death sentence delivered by a military court for Joseph Kabila, the former President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is “in contradiction with the protection of life and the values of the Gospel”, the Congolese bishops said. 

“The death penalty is not compatible with the Gospel and does not promote national cohesion,” said the statement signed by Archbishop Fulgence Muteba Mugalu of Lubumbashi, the conference president, after the former president was sentenced in absentia on 30 September. He had been convicted of war crimes, murder, sexual assault, torture, participation in an insurrectional movement, conspiracy, and supporting terrorism.  

Kabila, a former military commander who was president from 2001 to 2019, left the country in 2023 but reappeared in Goma, capital of the eastern province of North Kivu, occupied by guerrilla forces.  

The bishops called for a national dialogue, including Kabila and the rebel groups, to resolve political differences and end the violence that has blighted the eastern provinces of the DR Congo for three decades.

More than 18,000 people signed a petition supporting Georgetown University Law School in its refusal to shut down its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, after the United States Attorney’s Office threatened to stop extending internships and employment to the school’s students unless it did so. 

“With this administration, you don’t do something like this lightly,” said William Treanor, then-dean of the law school, who wrote a letter refusing to comply in March. He argued that DEI programmes are a “moral and educational imperative” in accord with the university’s Jesuit mission.

“You have to carefully consider what the consequences are going to be and what the risks to you are personally,” Treanor told the National Catholic Reporter. “But this is a time when you also have to do the right thing.  You have to stand up for your values and the values of the university.” 

Washington state attorney general Nick Brown announced that prosecutors would exempt clergy from reporting information about child sex abuse learned in the confessional. 

The state enacted a “mandatory reporting” law in May, including clergy among those required to report information, but unlike most such statutes it did not include an exemption for information garnered during the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Washington’s Catholic dioceses sued and a district court ruled in their favour. The state was appealing that decision when it decided to reach an accommodation with the bishops. 

“Today’s agreement respects the court’s decision in this case and maintains important protections for children,” said Brown. “It keeps crucial portions of Washington’s mandatory reporting law in place, while also preserving the legislature’s authority to address issues with the law identified by the court.” 

Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund which represented the dioceses in court, said: “Washington was wise to walk away from this draconian law and allow Catholic clergy to continue ministering to the faithful. This is a victory for religious freedom and for common sense. Priests should never be forced to make the impossible choice of betraying their sacred vows or going to jail.”

The 106-year-old nun who was chaplain to the men’s basketball team of Loyola University, Chicago died on 9 October. Sr Jean Dolores Schmidt, who belonged to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, retired in August after 32 years as chaplain.

A bishop warned that the people of the Peruvian Amazon are suffering from mercury poisoning ingested via fish and linked to illegal gold mining. “We are in a delicate situation,” said Bishop Miguel Ángel Cadenas of the Apostolic Vicariate of Iquitos, after tests found abnormal levels of mercury in Amazonian fish, a staple of the regional diet.

He organised the Amazon Water Summit in Iquitos this week under the theme “We Are Water, We Are Life, We Are Hope”, which issued a final declaration denouncing the environmental and social crisis threatening life in the region, particularly the problems caused by mining, oil exploitation and drug trafficking.

After more than half of Ecuador’s provinces declared a state of emergency, the country’s bishops warned that “violence is never the right path to build a better Ecuador”.  

They were reacting to escalating protests last week called by CONAIE, the main organisation of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, against the end of a diesel subsidy and a resulting rise in fuel prices. 

“Our first appeal has always been for dialogue and peace, and to all parties involved – from the government to social and indigenous organizations and civil society as a whole,” said Bishop David de la Torre Altamirano, an auxiliary in the Archdiocese of Quito. 

The protests began in mid-September when truck drivers began road blockades, and in the following days a national strike was declared, which spread to include indigenous and other workers.

The country’s bishops said dialogue was the only way to overcome political and social tensions, acknowledging the right to peaceful demonstrations but warning that violence threatens lives, harms innocent people, weakens the rule of law and disrupts social peace.

The Philippines’ Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of an “offending religious feelings” case filed by a retired judge against a Dominican exorcist priest. The ruling was promulgated on 29 September and published on 5 October.

The case stemmed from the allegedly offensive remarks made by the exorcist Fr Winston Cabading against the reported apparition of the Virgin Mary in Lipa City, Batangas, south of Manila, in 1948. The Vatican rejected the apparition in a 1951 decree, but it continues to inspire devotion even among a number of bishops and priests in the Philippines. 

The petitioner, retired anti-graft court judge Harriet Demetriou, said Cabading criticised the Lipa apparition “in a place devoted to religious worship” or during a religious ceremony. The court, however, pointed out that Cabading made his statements in a social media broadcast, not a religious ceremony, which meant it was not a violation of the Philippines’ blasphemy laws. 

Subscribing to Demetriou’s argument “would create a dangerous precedent” categorising a broad range of activities as a “religious ceremony”, the court said.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines launched its new Office for the Postulation of the Causes of Saints to promote new Filipino candidates for sainthood.  

“Let us normalise the idea of sainthood for all, especially among the young people,” said the Archbishop of Manila Cardinal Jose Advincula during a national conference on 7 October. Advincula hoped the new office would inspire Filipinos to live as “saints next door”. He emphasised that God “did not call the perfect” but “looked at the heart”.  

The Philippines, with the third largest Catholic population of any country in the world, has two canonised saints: Lorenzo Ruiz and Pedro Calungsod. Both of them were lay missionaries martyred in the seventeenth century. Efforts are under way to promote modern-day saints, including 22 causes for sainthood that have been recognised by the Vatican.

The Indian parliamentarian Derek O’Brien unveiled a statue of St Teresa of Calcutta outside the mother house of the Missionaries of Charity (MC) as the order marked its seventy-fifth anniversary. Archbishop Elias Frank of Calcutta presided at a Mass with MC Religious and lay volunteers for the occasion on 7 October, the date in 1950 that the Vatican approved Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu’s request to found the congregation.

O’Brien was instrumental in efforts to win the order legal title to the property in Kolkatta’s Motijheel slum where Mother Teresa began its work, which the Bengal government granted in March this year. The new statue of the “saint of the gutters” depicts her holding the hand of a little girl running towards her.

Church and rights activists condemned a surge in violence against media workers in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province after the murder of reporter Tufail Rind on 8 October, the third journalist to die there in as many months.

Rind’s death follows the September killing of Imtiaz Mir, ambushed by gunmen in Karachi, and the August murder of Khawar Hussain of Dawn News, found shot dead in his car in Sanghar. 

Fr Shahzad Arshad, director of the National Commission for Justice and Peace in Karachi, said the serial attacks show that “journalists face persecution similar to those who stand up for truth and justice in faith contexts”. He said journalists risk their lives when exposing corruption and injustice, and the state “should implement policies to protect them”. 

At least 13 media personnel have been killed in Sindh over the past six years, with no convictions. The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists organised a nationwide protest last weekend against the violence, condemning the authorities’ failure to arrest the murderers.

The Pope thanked officials of Aid to the Church in Need for their work supporting persecuted Christians and upholding religious freedom.

In an audience on 10 October with ACN International and the several directors of several national offices around the world, Pope Leo said that “your visit is timely, for our world continues to witness rising hostility and violence against those who hold different convictions, including many Christians”. 

In contrast to these challenges, “your mission proclaims that, as one family in Christ, we do not abandon our persecuted brothers and sisters”, he said, “rather, we remember them, we stand with them, and we labour to secure their God-given freedoms.” 

He praised ACN’s Religious Freedom in the World Report, published every two years, as an important tool to raise awareness and reveal the “hidden suffering of many”.

Comece, the Brussels-based association of bishops’ conferences in the European Union, has asked European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to help reinstate an EU Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief outside the European Union. 

This is “essential considering today’s context, marked by rising religious discrimination and persecution faced by individuals, religious minorities, and faith communities – the majority of whom are Christians – in many countries around the world,” Comece said. An envoy should be named “without further delay” with “adequate human and financial resources” for the mission, it said in their letter to von der Leyen.  

The position, created in 2024, has been vacant since December. The Comece autumn assembly also called again for an EU coordinator to address anti-Christian hatred within the Union, which it said Magnus Brunner, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, had acknowledged as a “growing phenomenon … within the EU”.

The Vatican named two new bishops in Belgium, both from religious communities. Pope Leo approved the nomination of Fr Fabien Lejeusne, superior of the Assumptionists in Europe, as Bishop of Namur and Fr Frédéric Rossignol, a former Spiritan provincial for Vietnam and India, as Bishop of Tournai. Their ordinations are due in December. 

Both incumbents – Pierre Warin and Guy Harpigny – are already 77 years old, two years beyond the customary retirement age, but Lejeusne is 52 and Rossignol 51. “These appointments … are called upon to anchor our Church in a new era, an era in which our country will once again become a true mission land,” said Vincent Delcorps of CathoBel, the Church voice in francophone Belgium. 

For Flemish-speaking Catholics, Otheo news service said: “A true generational shift has begun in our country. We now have three people in their fifties at the helm of dioceses, after Archbishop Luc Terlinden [of Mechelen-Brussels].” The appointment of the two religious “brings with it an element of internationalisation. They have both travelled the world and are in contact with diverse cultures,” Otheo said.

The Belgian abbey of Maredsous is introducing a new beer, appropriately called “la Basilique”, to help finance a long-delayed restoration project for its church. The neo-Gothic Benedictine abbey south of Namur is only 140 years old, but the ravages of time and humidity have set in.  

“The monks used to make beer to compensate for the lack of meat,” said Abbot François Lear. “Today, we’re reviving it not for the vitamins … but to finance the restoration. La Basilique is a beer with a marked bitterness, but with a surprising taste. We hope it will raise funds for a vital project,” he said. 

Maredsous abbey, a centre both for retreats and tourism, is better known for its cheese and its annual fairs. It brewed beer in its early years but gave up production long ago. “This project is a sign of life. It expresses our faith in the future, despite the aging of the community,” the abbot said.

Fire destroyed a seventeenth-century monastery in northern Italy. The 21 cloistered Ambrosian nuns of the Bernaga monastery near Milan were evacuated during the blaze on 11 October, with one suffering from mild smoke inhalation. St Carlo Acutis made his first Holy Communion at the age of seven at the monastery in 1998.

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith announced the appointment of five judges for the canonical trial of Fr Marko Rupnik, the artist expelled from the Society of Jesus in June 2023 following allegations of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse. In a statement on Monday, the dicastery said the panel appointed on 9 October included women and clergy without curial office, “in order to better guarantee, as in any judicial process, the autonomy and independence of the aforementioned court”.

FaithInvest, an international movement promoting faith-based investing, published a revised guide to help faith-based organisations make a conscious effort to align their investable assets with their tradition’s beliefs and values.

The revised version is organised around the fundamentals of faith-consistent investing and establishing and managing comprehensive programmes. It contains four case studies from a variety of faith traditions to provide examples of leading programmes and how beliefs, teachings, and values have been applied to investment practices.

It observes that “faith traditions have long emphasised the importance of integrating moral and ethical values into every aspect of life”, explaining that faith-consistent investing aims to provide faith-based asset owners “with a roadmap for supporting the pursuit of transformative social and environmental change while honouring their obligation to prudently manage their financial assets”.

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