For four days from 24-28 May, the Kirchentag was one of the highlights of the Reformation Jubilee. Prominent religious leaders, politicians, economists and other well-known personalities, including former US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed Muhammad el-Tayyeb, spoke on and debated current social and political issues and thousands worshipped together and attended the many concerts and cultural events. Most of the prominent speakers deplored the recent terrorist attack in Manchester.

Standing in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate – which was cut off from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall during the 40-year Cold War and became the best known symbol of a divided Germany – Barack Obama called out to the crowds, “In this new world we live in, we can’t isolate ourselves, we can’t hide behind a wall.”

Strongly supported by Obama, Merkel defended her asylum policy. Pointing to the “dilemma” of the gulf between Christian compassion and Realpolitik, she once again underlined the importance of welcoming those in real need of protection but rejecting those who did not conform to asylum conditions.

Tymoteusz Szydlo, 25, son of Poland’s Prime Minister was ordained on Saturday May 27 in a ceremony attended by the Polish head of government and her family in the southern city of Bielsko-Biala. Prime Minister Szydlo’s other son, 23-year-old Blazej, is a medical student.

Within the next 10-20 years, a new and controversial fertility technology called in vitro gametogenesis could make it possible to manipulate skin cells into creating a human baby. However, this groundbreaking research has caused push-back from some critics, like Fr Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Centre, who says IVG would turn procreation into a transaction.

“IVG extends the faulty logic of IVF by introducing additional steps to the process of manipulating the origins of the human person, in order to satisfy the desires of customers and consumers,” Fr Pacholczyk told CNA in an email interview.

“The technology also offers the possibility of introducing further fractures into parenthood, distancing children from their parents by multiplying the number of those involved in generating the child, so that 3-parent embryos, or even more parents, may become involved,” he continued.

However, Fr Pachol-czyk hopes that potential parents will come to realize that children should not products that can be ordered or purchased by consumers, and should rather be seen as a gift. “Turning commer-cial laboratories to crea-te children on our behalf is an unethical step in the direction of treating our offspring as objects to be planned and created in the pursuit of parental grati-fication, rather than gifts received from the Lord.”

Paris turned off the lights of the Eiffel Tower at 12:45AM on May 27 to pay tribute to the victims of the attack in Egypt’s Minya that left at least 28 people dead. The symbolic blackout of the monument was announced by the Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on Friday, May 26  night from her Twitter account, Efe news reported.

Hidalgo lamented that the Christian community in Egypt was again the target of a barbaric and cowardly attack, adding that her thoughts are with the victims and their families. On May 26 night, the Eiffel Tower was shut down from 12.45 AM (local time) as a sign of sympathy to Egyptian Copts, said her second tweet.