Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who has been caught up in a real estate scandal, speaks to the media a day after he resigned, Rome, Italy, September 25 2020.
A Vatican judge on Saturday ordered 10 people, including an Italian cardinal, to stand trial for alleged financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office.
Those indicted include Cardinal Angelo Becciu as well as the former heads of the Vatican’s financial intelligence unit and two Italian brokers involved in the Vatican’s purchase of a building in a luxury area of London.
Becciu, who Pope Francis fired last year and who has always maintained his innocence during a two-year investigation, became the highest ranking Vatican based Church official to be indicted for alleged financial crimes.
As per Church law, the pope personally approved the judge’s decision to investigate and indict Becciu. The charges against him include embezzlement and abuse of office. An Italian woman who worked for Becciu was charged with embezzlement.
Italian brokers Gianluigi Torzi and Raffaele Mincione were indicted on charges of embezzlement, fraud and money laund-ering. Torzi, for whom Italian magistrates issued an arrest warrant in April, was also charged with extortion.
Both have denied wrongdoing. Four companies associated with individual defendants, two in Switzerland, one in the United States and one in Slovenia, were also indicted. The trial is due to start on July 27 in the Vatican, a statement said.

Reports are emerging of religious leaders being among those detained amid unprecedented nationwide protests in Cuba…
Protests erupted across the country on 11 July in response to Cuba’s ongoing and severe economic crisis and a record surge in corona-virus cases, before expanding to criticisms of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP)’s decades-long hold on power, crackdown on human rights and pro-democracy movements, and management of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In response, the government appears to have disconnected the internet in most of the island’s major cities, but reports of violations targeting protesters and religious leaders have continued to emerge. Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel also made public calls for ‘revolutionaries’ to take to the streets to defend the Revolution by fighting protestors.

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning the ongoing repression the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a formation that unites Kurdish forces and the left by the Turkish government. The signatories of the document stress that this retreat “reveals the dire human rights situation in Turkey and the continued erosion of democracy and the rule of law.”
The text was approved with 603 votes in favour and only two against. Promoted by Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens and Leftists, it condemns “the repression of opposition political parties, particularly the HDP, and urged the government to ensure that all parties can freely and fully exercise their legitimate activities in accordance with the basic principles of a pluralist and democratic system.”
The European politicians express “deep concern” about “this serious backsliding on the freedom of the opposition parties to function” in Turkey.

In a June 20 inter-view with Croatian Catholic weekly Glas Koncila, the Christian politician, who has been disparaged by Pope Francis as a populist and nationalist, dismissed reports of Francis’ refusal to meet him on the Hungary papal visit as “false news.”
Attributing media reports first published by faithful Catholic Vaticanist Edward Pentin to “anti-Church and anti-Christian circles,” the prime minister went on to claim that a lack of clarity regarding protocol was responsible for the breakdown in diplomacy.
Pope Francis is visiting Hungary not as head of state but as head of the Catholic Church attending the Eucharistic Congress, which is not a Hungarian event, Orbán noted.
Nevertheless, Orbán remarked that “what hurts [him] the most,” is that he would “not be able to attend the beatification of Cdl. Stefan Wyszyñski, which takes place on the same day in Poland as the World Eucharistic Congress in Hungary.”
A Vatican expert told Church Militant that “Orbán’s considerable regret at not being able to attend Wyszyñski’s beatification is likely a dig at Francis and his handlers for planning a papal visit to Budapest lasting just a few hours and, at first, even refusing to meet the nation’s leaders.”

In Hong Kong right now, Jimmy Lai is sacrificing all — his fortune and possibly his life — for his God, his fellow man, and for freedom.
Lai is a billiona-ire, although he wasn’t always one. Born two years before the Communists defeated the nationalists in China’s civil war, his father fled and his mother was sent to a labor camp when he was a young child. Carrying bags for train passengers and getting by as a street vendor, he first tasted freedom when a man from British Hong Kong gave him a bar of chocolate.
Lai is a British citizen, al-though he wasn’t always one. Having seen a glimpse of prosperity and freedom, he chased it to the then-free British island colony, stowing away aboard a ship when he was just 12 years old and working on the floor of a clothing factory.
Lai is a Catholic, although he wasn’t always one. He met the faith through his wife, a pious woman he accompanied to church, where he heard the homilies of Cardinal Joseph Zen and in 1997 was baptized into the church by the same great man.
Today Lai is in a prison cell in Hong Kong, and the Communist dictatorship has once again seized one of his life’s works, shutting do-wn his newspaper. “I have a soul,” he said in early 2019, and so the truth lives in him.
“No one can say we didn’t fight… Prison life is the pinnacle of my life. I am completely at peace.”

A bust of Seo Sang-don greets visitors at the office of Daegu Archdiocese in Daegu, the third-largest city in South Korea and a Catholic stronghold. Archbishop Thaddeus Cho Hwan-kil unveiled the bust in 2011 as part of activities to pay tribute to Seo ahead of the 100th anniversary of his death.
When Seo died in Seoul on June 30, 1913, Bishop Demange attended his funeral and paid homage by calling him “a great fellow and extraordinary craftsman who remained an ordinary man despite being rich.” “He served the Church and the Church also helped him. He accomplished a lot of good things. He donated the sites of Daegu Cathedral Church, bishop’s house, office, seminary and houses from missionaries. We should live up to his great virtues. We are very grateful to him,” Bishop Demange wrote in his diary, according to an article in Catholic Times by Andrew Lee Kyung-gyu, an emeritus professor at Daegu Catholic University.