Geneva residents on February 10 voted for a controversial new “secularism law,” which will among other things ban elected officials and public employees from wearing visible religious symbols.

More than 55% voters in the Swiss canton backed the law, final results showed, despite warnings that it could lead to discrimination, particularly against Muslim women. Some critics think it might violate the constitution.

Geneva Canton, which for centuries has been a centre of religious freedom and tolerance, has been striving to replace a law on the books since 1907.

The new law’s stated ambition is to expand the dialogue between religious groups and the state, and to better define the limits to religious expression in the public sphere.

Supporters say it will help clarify existing principles in the Geneva Constitution to protect the religious freedom of believers and non-believers alike.

The right-leaning cantonal parliament adopted the text last April. It also has the backing of Geneva’s three main religious communities, the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church and the Old Catholic Church.

But the far left, the Greens, feminist organizations, unions and Muslim groups all opposed it, and collected enough signa-tures to force the issue to a public vote.

The Chaldean Patriarch, Card Louis Raphael Sako, issued a pastoral letter on the “originality and authenticity” of the “renewal” of the Chaldean Church, which was sent to AsiaNews for wider circulation.

In it, the prelate notes that the Church must “give answers” to the questions and challenges of modernity, the passage of time and prepare for those “that will come in the future.” Hence, “no one should be afraid” to change rites and traditions without losing their original missionary nature.

In his letter, the cardinal warns against fear of “modernity.” To those who criticise changes in rituals, customs and traditions, he asks if they “today wear the garments that were once popular in their villages of origin.”

Practices and traditions are not the same as “ancestors” and this change is physiological because it is an adaptation “to the new society.”

Thus, he goes on to say, we need to “prepare the texts of our liturgy in Arabic, Kurdish, English, French, German,” or the other languages of the Diaspora countries where new Chaldean communities have emerged in the last few decades.

In the new millennium, the US invasion of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State (IS) group contributed to this exodus, which has bled the communities of their members.

The cardinal’s letter comes at a time of controversies and divisions in Eastern Churches over liturgical reform, with some stubbornly holding onto the dictates of tradition.

To back his argument, Msgr Sako cites the case of the Malabar Church in India, which tran-slated the various rites from the original “Chaldean-Syriac language, like ours” into Malayam and promoted “a reform” so that rites could be “understood by its believers.” “We are a Church, not a museum called to preserve a certain heritage,” the cardinal writes. In fact, for him, there is a danger that the “missionary dimension and the sense of evangelisation” of the Eastern Catholic communities might be lost “because of the geopolitical situation, the pressures and persecutions,” which have led to “closed ethnic Churches: Chaldean, Assyrian, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic and Maronite, each with its own geographical and linguistic affiliation.”

Faced with a plummeting population, rising labour shortages and widespread emigration, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has long taken an unconventional approach to increasing the size and productivity of Hungary’s work force.

He offered university scholarships only to those who promised to stay in Hungary. He gave citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living beyond the borders. And late last year, he increased the amount of overtime employers can demand of workers — to 400 hours a year.

Mr Orban announced one of his most ambitious plans yet: Any Hungarian woman with four or more children will no longer pay income tax.

“We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe. People in the West are responding to this with immigration,” Mr Orban said in a speech. “Hungarians see this in a different light. We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children.”

No country in the European Union has a fertility rate high enough to replenish its population without immigration — but Hungary, with about 1.5 children per woman, is among the most sluggish. It also is among the most reluctant to accept foreign workers to help plug the gaps.

Even in the Czech Republic and Poland, where anti-immigrant sentiment also runs high, governments are planning to admit, or have already admitted, workers from across Asia. But Mr.Orban, a far-right leader, has said he does not want the color of Hungarians to be “mixed with those of others.” He led European opposition to refugees during the 2015 migration crisis and has boxed himself into a rhetorical corner that now makes it difficult to change direction.

A church service that has been performed continuously for 96 days has come to an end after the Dutch government agreed to pardon a family the pastors were shielding from deportation as part of a wider amnesty.

Sasun Tamrazyan, his wife Anousche and their children Hayarpi, 21, Warduhi, 19, and Seyran, 15, have been holed up in the Bethel church in The Hague since October, relying on a medi-eval law that says immigration authorities cannot enter while a religious service is being perfo-rmed.

The family, who have been in the Netherland for nine years, had claimed their lives would be in danger if they returned to Armenia, where Sasun had been a political activist.

But the Dutch coalition government announced under pressure from campaigners that they would examine the cases of 700 children and their families who are under the threat of deportation. Residency rights were likely to be granted in 630 of the cases, government officials said.

The Pope’s former doctrinal chief has published a “Manifesto of Faith” in which he warns of the “fraud of Antichrist” being perpetrated by those who fail to teach the faith correctly.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, writes that there is “growing confusion about the doctrine of the faith.”

In the face of this, “many bishops, priests, religious and lay people of the Catholic Chur-ch have requested that I make a public testimony about the truth of revelation.”

He says it is the task of the shepherds of the Church to guide Catholics on the path of salvation. “This can only succeed if they know this way and follow it themselves.”

But today, many Christians are no longer even aware of the basic teachings of the faith, so there is a growing danger of missing the path to eternal life, he warns.

Cardinal Müller says Christ is the “point of reference,” rather than the “views of a majority or the spirit of the times.”

He drew a rapid response from the German prelate, Cardi-nal Walter Kasper, who writing on the German site Katholisch, says there is no doubt that the manifesto contains many state-ments of faith that every upright Catholic can whole heartedly affi-rm, but there are also problems.