The protesters killed in Tiananmen Square in mainland China on June 4, 1989, used to be remembered in Hong Kong with an annual candlelight vigil in the city’s expansive Victoria Park, attended by crowds as big as 130,000, all holding flickering candles.
Now the lawful gatherings seem to be limited to seven Catholic churches. The reason for the dramatic downsizing? Politics and the pandemic. Police said they had to cancel the event this year and last year because of social distancing rules put in place to control the spread of COVID-19. This year’s event is the first one banned since the Chinese government in Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong last June. The controversial legislation prohibits acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.

Pope Francis has appointed South Korean Bishop Lazarus You Heungsik of Daejeon as the new prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Clergy.
The Vatican made the announcement June 11, adding that the outgoing prefect, Italian Cardinal Beniamino Stella, 79, would remain at the congregation until the new prefect could assume his role.
The new prefect has also been made an archbishop, the Vatican added.
Born Nov. 17, 1951, in Nonsan, Archbishop You studied in Seoul and in Rome, where he received his doctorate in dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Lateran University.

Seventy-five-year-old Sister Giuseppina Berti, who has worked for 26 years in the leprosarium of Tabriz and now lives in Isfahan in the house of the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, will have to leave Iran in the coming days. In fact, her visa has not been renewed and she has received a travel order. Her departure will make it difficult for her fellow nun, Sister Fabiola Weiss, a 77-year  years old Austrian, who has dedicated 38 years to the poor and the sick in the leprosy hospital, and whose residence permit has been renewed for another year. The two religious nuns, who have dedicated their lives to the country’s sick without distinction of religious or ethnic affiliation, are forced to abandon the Congregation’s house, built in 1937.

The head of Germany’s lay Catholics has said he is “shattered” by the resignation of Cardinal Reinhard Marx while others have written to Pope Francis, asking him not to accept.
The head of the Central Committee of German lay Catholics (ZdK), Thomas Sternberg, with whom Marx initiated the German synodal path for church reform in December 2019, told the Rheinische Post that he was “shattered” by Marx’s resignation. “Should the Pope accept his resignation, that will leave a huge hole in the German Church”, he said.