The few hundred worshippers who showed up were asked to refrain from shaking others’ hands or holding them during prayers to prevent the spread of the virus that started in China.
In Hong Kong, Cardinal John Hon Tong, wearing a mask, announced the suspension of public Masses for two weeks and urged churchgoers to instead watch them online.

Buddhist Temples, Christian churches and Muslim Mosques have been ordered closed since Jan. 29 in mainland China, where the new coronavirus strain was first detected in the central city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak. Mosques have cancel-ed weekly Friday prayers since January under an order to avoid “collective religious activities.”

The restrictions and dwindling crowds in religiously diverse places of worship underscore the extent of the scare over the out-break that has permeated many aspects of life in the hard-hit Asian region. The virus has killed more than 1,500 people and infected more than 67,000 others, mostly in China, where several cities that are home to more than 60 million people have been placed under lockdown in an unprecedented effort to contain the disease.

A survey released in January showed that the percentage of Catholics in Brazil continues to decline, while the proportion of evangelicals has increased at a higher annual rate in the past few years.

According to the private institute Datafolha, the proportion of Catholics in Brazil currently corresponds to 51%, while the percentage of evangelicals grew to 31%. In 2013, another Datafolha survey had shown that Catholics represented 57% of the Brazilian population, and Evangelicals amounted to 28%. The last official census produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics demonstrated in 2010 that the proportion of Catholics corresponded to 64.6% and evangelicals amounted to 22.2%. The institute will conduct the next census this year.

From our sister publication: A Place to Call Home, a new series focusing on women religious helping people who are home-less.

Although the surveys produced by Datafolha and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics are not comparable — due to methodological differences — it’s clear that the number of Catholics is decreasing at a faster rate in the past few years, explained José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a demography expert who worked at the Brazilian Institute.

“From the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, the Catholic Church lost about 1% of its followers per decade. From the 1990s on, it started to shrink about 1% per year,” he told the National Catholic Reporter.

Alves believes that this process has accelerated since 2010 and now he estimates that the current rate of Catholic decline corresponds to 1.2% per year — with 0.8% of annual evangelical expansion. If nothing changes, evangelicalism will surpass Catholicism in Brazil by 2032, he calculates.

That would be a major transformation in a country that has the biggest Catholic population in the world, with more than 90% of Brazilians identifying as Catholic in 1970.

On Feb. 11, Cardinal Joseph Zen, emeritus bishop of Hong Kong met with Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. After that meeting, the cardinal gave an exclusive interview to CNA in which he discussed the Church in China, the Holy See’s agreement with the Communist regime, and his relationship with Pope Francis and the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

“More and more, the Church is under persecution [in China]. Both the official Church, and the underground. Actually, the underground is doomed to disappear. Why? Because even the Holy See is not helping. The older bishops are dying, there are less than 30 bishops left in the underground Church, and no new priests being ordained.

“But we hope that [Chinese Catholics] can keep the faith in their families — so we have to say, ‘back to the catacombs!’

“The Holy Father Francis shows special affection to me. In interviews, they ask him ‘What about Cardinal Zen?’ and the Pope says ‘He’s a good man.’ …he says ‘maybe he’s a little frightened, his age…’ I say my age? I’m old, I’m 88, but the age helps me not to have any fear. Because I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose.”

“So I’m—I can sincerely say that I am not—I think the Pope is okay. But I’m fighting [Cardinal Pietro] Parolin Because the bad things come from him. From him. He’s still so, so, so optimistic about the so-called ‘Ostpolitik,’ the compromise.”

Pope Francis released his document on the Amazon region on the 15th anniversary of the assassination in Brazil of U.S. Notre Dame Sister Dorothy Stang, a missionary who defended the poor and the environment.

Her life and sacrifices are emblematic of what many participants at the October Synod of Bishops for the Amazon had said: Women in the region are leaders of both community and religious life; their defense of the poor and the natural environment is consistent and consistently results in threats to their lives. In his postsynodal apostolic exhortation, “Querida Amazonia” (Beloved Amazonia), which was published on Feb. 12, Pope Francis said consecrated men and women in the Amazon are “closest to those who are most impoverished and excluded.”

The Pope devoted an entire section of the document to praising the way women — lay and religious — have kept the faith alive in the Amazon region. But he flatly rejects a request made by several synod participants to consider ordaining women deacons; the request did not receive enough support to be included in the Synod’s final document. At the end of the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon, and on numerous other occasions, Pope Francis has said Catholics still have not understood how and why women are important in the church.

At least 24 people were killed after unidentified gunmen attacked a church in northern Burkina Faso, officials said on Feb. 17, in the latest assault against places of worship in the West African nation.

The attack took place on Feb. 16 during a weekly service at a Protestant Church in the village of Pansi in Yagha, a volatile province near the border with Niger.

A group of “armed terrorists attacked the peaceful local population after having identified them and separated them from non-residents,” Colonel Salfo Kabore, the regional governor, told AFP news agency.

“The provisional toll is 24 killed, including the pastor… 18 wounded and individuals who were kidnapped,” he added.

A resident of the nearby town of Sebba said Pansi villagers fled there for safety.

“It hurt me when I saw the people,” Sihanri Osangola Brigadie, the mayor of Boundore commune, told The Associated Press news agency after visiting victims in the hospital in Dori town, 180km (110 miles) from the attack.

The attackers looted oil and rice from shops and forced three youth they kidnapped to help transport it on their motorbikes, he said.

‘Alarming rate’ Christians and churches have become frequent targets in the north of the country.

Before fewdays, also in Yagha province, a retired pastor was killed and another pastor abducted by gunmen, according to an internal security report for aid workers.

Violence has dramatically escalated in the once-peaceful West African nation.

Analysts are concerned that attacks against civilians, including Christians, are increasing “at an alarming rate.”

More than 1,300 civilians were killed in targeted attacks last year in Burkina Faso, more than seven times the previous year, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which collects and analyses conflict information.

The Chinese government has temporarily closed all of the country’s places of worship in an effort to contain the COVID-19 respiratory coronavirus that has now killed almost 3,000 people, with more than 80,000 around the world verified with infections.

The government also banned all group religious activities, including at the YMCA. But it also praised religious groups of all faiths for raising money in an effort to help people afflicted by the disease, people trapped in quarantine zones as well as health workers and others on the front line of the fight to contain the epidemic.

“The party committee and government have unified requirements to suspend the opening of religious venues, suspend all collective religious activities, delay the opening of religious schools, strengthen publicity and guidance for religious people, actively donate goods, and do a lot of work to win the fight against epidemic prevention and control,” said an official statement.

Government religious regulators said religious groups should adhere to the health of staff, believers and members in the first place, and make sure they have deployed and purchased disinfectants, hand sanitizers, masks, etc. They have ordered testing and disinfection of public areas.

The disease is now thought even more highly infectious than first thought by medical researchers, and it continues to spread throughout Asia, North America and in Europe. Most of the fatalities and infections remain in mainland China, which reported 508 new cases and 71 new deaths on Feb 25, bringing totals in the People’s Republic to more than 77,000 cases and more than 2,660 deaths.

The Bishops of Nigeria have asked Catholics to wear black on Ash Wednesday as a sign of mourning and solidarity with the victims of kidnappings and terror attacks.

In a statement due to be read in all Nigerian parishes on Ash Wednesday, the president of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Nigeria, Arch-bishop Augustine Akubeze, asks the faithful to wear black, or a black armband, and to join a “Day of Prayer Procession” to protest the crimes of the Islamist group Boko Haram.

Archbishop Akubeze goes on to condemn the public impunity of the perpetrators of such crimes, the lack of arrests of criminals by the government, and the threats made to many communities on an ongoing basis. He also called for support from the international community in the fight for security and religious freedom in Nigeria.

Fewer than half the Orthodox world’s 14 main churches are due to attend a late February summit on Ukraine’s new independent Orthodox Church, convened in Jordan with backing from Russia’s Moscow Patriarchate. “As we have all recognised, dialogue and reconciliation between brothers is the only way forward,” the summit’s organiser, Patriarch Theophilos Giannopoulos of Jerusalem, told church leaders.

“This will not be an official Synod, but rather a fraternal meeting to inaugurate dialogue on challenges facing the Orthodox community at this critical time, as we continue to use every means of communication with the Ecumenical Patriarchate in order to reach a consensus.”

The 67-year-old patriarch sent the open letter ahead of the 25-27 February summit in Amman, called to debate ways of settling disputes over the new church.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defence minister, agrees with advocates of radical change in the nation’s Roman Catholic Church.

Kramp-Karrenbauer, 57, often known as “AKK” in German media, a member of the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told journalists on Feb. 3 that she wished there were many more women in church leadership, beginning with their serving as deacons.

“And I am for the abolition of celibacy. It would help to make more people enthusiastic to serve the church,” she said, adding that the decision to live without a family poses too great an obstacle for those wanting to dedicate their lives to the church.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s fellow CDU member, Heribert Hirte, said in a telephone interview that AKK entered a political minefield when she called for an end to celibacy in the priesthood. He said the church opposes such political intervention into its internal affairs. Still, he praised Kramp-Karrenbauer for her courage in making a public statement.

Hirte, a Catholic, said that women are getting increasingly impatient as they wait for the church to give them a greater role. And an increasing number of Germans, he said, don’t care at all about religion.

Pope Francis was never going to fall into the trap set for him by his opponents over the Amazon Synod. His response, contrary to the initial reaction, propels the Church on a path of ongoing reform. It’s just not in the way people expected.

After bishops from the region voted overwhelmingly in favour to ordained married men as priests in the Amazon, those intent on thwarting this pontificate kicked up such a fuss that any shift Francis made risked totally distracting from the central message of the Synod: the Church’s work to protect the environment and to stand in solidarity with the Amazon’s indigenous communities.

The 83-year-old Roman Pontiff was left in a bind. Faced with a pincer movement, the Pope appeared simply to ignore the contested questions around ordination in his text – on married men, and female deacons – and upheld the status quo.

But the story does not end there. The Pope’s response has opened doors rather than closing them and has laid the groundwork for future reforms. Francis did not say “no” to married priests in the document just “not at the moment.”

In his post-synodal exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Francis made no explicit mention of the ordination of married men and only affirmed what “cannot be delegated” from the priesthood. He set the framework for discussions but did not silence any voice. All the hot-button issues remain on the table, while a wider debate about how to devolve power away from a tiny group at the top of the Church hierarchy is very much under way.

In the Synod’s final text 128 bishops voted to ordain married deacons as priests in remote regions while 137 in favour of continuing discussions on female deacons.