An armed man was killed in a shootout with police outside the residence of the Archbishop of Cebu in the Philippines on July 10 morning.

The man, who arrived on a motorbike and was wearing a facemask and helmet, entered the residence and said he was looking for Archbishop Jose Palma, who was in Manila at the time.

“The man appeared to be disturbed because he wasn’t clear on what he was saying. One of the secretaries of the archbishop noticed what seemed to be a firearm tucked in the man’s waist, prompting him to call the police,” Police Chief Superintendent Debold Sinas said, according to the Inquirer, a Philippines newspaper.

“When we arrived in the area, the man was on board his motorcycle. Our operatives tried to approach him, but he said ‘Don’t touch me’ before he fired at us,” a police officer on the scene told the Inquirer.

Palma has been an outspoken critic of the growing violence surrounding the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has led a war against drugs that has been marked by extra-judicial killings of drug dealers and others.

The archbishop was in Manila for the Plenary Assembly of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, which issued a strong statement aimed at the regime.

The Church has been a constant target of Duterte, who has warned against the bishops’ “creeping influence” in the country. Since December, three priests have been gunned down in the country.
Father Joseph Tan, the archdiocese’s press officer, issued a statement saying that there was “no known prior threat” to Palma.

A priest in China’s Henan province claims to have received a notice from municipal authori-ties requesting churches in the province gather statistics on the backgrounds of their congrega-tions, especially those from poor families.

But he is refusing to cooperate out of fear that anyone named in the register could be barred from receiving state subsidies as punishment for practicing their faith.

“This is totally unreasonable. I suspect their hidden agenda may be to cancel people’s low-income subsidies,” said the man, who declined to give his name for fear of reprisals from the state.

China has forged an uneasy truce with the Vatican in recent years despite the Communist country being officially atheist. Pew Institute figures suggest it now has a population of 10 million Catholics with 10% concentrated in Henan, consider-ed the cradle of Chinese civilization.

“Now we just have to wait for the inspection team to come and see what they say before we determine our next move,” added the clergyman, an open-church priest who serves in Luoyang Diocese of Sanmenxia City.

Lists of clergy must also be hung up at parishes so that officials can confirm they have the necessary permits to preach from the pulpit, the notice said.

‘If any one can go to heaven, talk to God, and take a selfie – I will resign.’

President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has offered to resign if anyone can take a selfie with God to prove he exists. His comments came just days after he called God “stupid.”

The latest outburst shows Duterte, aged 73, increasingly at odds with the Church in which he was raised and to which most Filipinos belong.

In the last few days, Duterte has also said he does not like the “creeping influence” of the Catholic Church. In addition, his presidential spokesman has accused the Church of working with Communist rebels to overthrow the government in the Philippines. The spokesman said the Church “sometimes runs counter to what the government believes to be good for the people, at least in this temporal life.”

In his latest speech on June 30 at the inauguration of the Malayan colleges in Mindanao, Duterte invited everyone “to become agents of hope and catalysts of progress.”

After describing his own progress through the education system and then his career in law and politics, he said he believed in God, but did not believe in a God who intervenes in the world. “Otherwise there would be no widespread injustice: hunger, killings, and all.” The president said in his latest address: “Every Filipino is entitled to criticise me as a matter of right. A general, a school dean, the academe, the students.” Catholic bishops in the Philippines, concerned about an increase in violence and police reaction to crime, announced a day of prayer and penance on July 16 and three days of fasting, prayer and penance on July 17-19. The bishops said they wanted to “invoke God’s mercy and justice on those who have blasphemed God’s Holy Name, those who slander and bear false witness, and those who commit murder or justify murder as a means for fighting criminality in our country.”

Pope Francis’ ecumenical meeting next Saturday, July 7th, in Bari with the heads of the Churches and of the Christian communities of the Middle East will be “a strong gesture in its essentiality” to strengthen the path of unity among Christians and to reiterate that there cannot be a Middle East without Christians.

The meeting, which will have the title “Peace be with you! Christians together for the Middle East,” was presented today in the Vatican by Card. Leonardo Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and Card. Kurt Koch, resident of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity.

The Middle East, said Card. Koch, is the land of origin of Christianity and “it is therefore not by chance that the event that marked the beginning of the “dialogue of charity” between Catholics and Orthodox took place in Jerusalem” with the embrace of Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of January 6, 1964.

“The Middle East, the land of its origins, is also one of the regions of the world where the situation of Christians is most pre-carious. Because of wars and persecution, many families abandon their historical homeland in search of security and a better future. The percentage of Christians in the Middle East has fallen dramatically over the course of a century: while they represented 20% of the population of the Middle East before the First World War, now they are only 4%. The martyred region, the Middle East is also a place where ecumenical relations are stronger and more promising, especially between Orthodox and Catholics.”