While the Catholic Church continues to play its part in helping people in Nigeria, the policies of the current government obstruct a clear path toward peace and reconciliation between Christians and Muslims, said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, Nigeria. Addressing a virtual conference on peacebuilding, hosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Kukah said the rise of banditry and violence in Nigeria “has taken over and consumed a lot of the gains we have made” in building peace.
“Just to tell you how little progress we have made, we still have a military general as our president. And, therefore, it is little wonder that this journey has proven to be a challenge and a source of great difficulty for our people,” he said June 20. Attacks against Christians, especially Catholics, have been on the rise in the country. On June 5, gunmen entered St. Francis Xavier Church in Owo, killing at least 50 people and leaving dozens wounded.
Most recently, gunmen attacked churchgoers June 20 at St. Moses Catholic Church as well as a neighboring Baptist church in the northern state of Kaduna, killing three and kidnapping 40 people.

“I was raised in a Muslim family in Tehran, Iran. My mother was a teacher and the principal of an elementary school. She knew a lot about Islam and did her best to follow its teachings. She helped me learn to read the Qur’an, taught me to pray at least three times a day, and encouraged me to fast during Ramadan.” says Nathan Rostampour
“As a young Muslim, I had been taught that the Bible was corrupted, that the version we read today is a distortion of its original contents. But as I listened to this woman read from Scripture, I felt something of its power—and I felt sure that a book capable of grabbing my heart that intensely couldn’t be corrupted after all.”
Typically, my mother would get offended if someone disagreed with her Islamic values. On that day, however, something surprising happened. Instead of fighting back, she listened peace-fully and asked questions. There wasn’t a trace of defensiveness; it appeared that she simply wanted to know the truth.”
“One year after I gave my heart to Jesus, my father died of cancer. It was a great sadness for our family. But he had become a great believer, and in his last days, he was praising Jesus on his bed, even during the toughest moments of chemotherapy. I remember sitting by his bed and reading the Bible for him. Afterward, I would pray for God’s healing touch. And my father would raise his hands to show that he was praying and worshiping alongside me.”
“Meanwhile, my wife and I host a weekly Christian fellowship on Instagram for Persian-speaking people in secret house churches in places like Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. People tune in from all over the world, and we worship God together and pray for each other.” Nathan Rostampour is a church planting pastor and a leadership coach and serves with The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

The theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches has reached a point where it seems appropriate to consider expanding the opportunities for the faithful of any of the churches to receive the sacraments from one another when they are not available in their own community, Pope Francis said.
“Based on the theological consensus noted by your commission, would it not be possible to extend and multiply such pastoral arrangements, especially in contexts where our faithful are in minority and diaspora situations?” the pope asked members of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches.
Welcoming the commission members June 23, Francis said that “ecumenism always has a pastoral character” and is not simply about theological ideas.
“Among our churches, which share apostolic succession, the broad consensus revealed by your commission not only about baptism, but also other sacraments, should encourage us to deepen a ‘pastoral ecumenism,’” he said.

The United States contains a “significant” number of groups seeking to “gag” the reforms of the Catholic Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council, Pope Francis said in a new interview.
“In the European Church I see more renewal in the spontaneous things that are emerging: movements, groups, new bishops who remember that there is a Council behind them,” said Francis in a conversation with the editors of Jesuit journals of Europe.
“Restorationism has come to gag the Council,” he continued. “The number of groups of ‘restorers’ — for example, in the United States there are many — is significant.”
The conversation between the pope and the editors took place on May 19 and a transcript of the encounter was published in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica on June 14.
Over the last year, Pope Francis has instituted a number of reforms meant to serve as a correction to Catholics who have rejected the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.
Among the reforms of Vatican II, which took place from 1962-1965, was the approval of the translation of the liturgy from Latin into vernacular languages, in an effort to make the Mass more accessible and involve greater participation of the laity.

A theologian considered close to Pope Francis has warned that the German Synodal Way is at risk of “breaking its own neck” if it does not heed the objections raised by a growing number of bishops around the world.
Cardinal Walter Kasper also said organisers were using a “lazy trick” that in effect constituted a “coup d’etat” that could result in a collective resignation, reported CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.
The 89-year-old German cardinal is President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and was Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart from 1989 to 1999.
He spoke at an online study day on June 19 of the initiative “New Beginning” (Neuer Anfang), a reform movement critical of the Synodal Way.
Kasper warned that the Church was not some substance to be “remoulded and reshaped to suit the situation”.
In April, more than 100 cardinals and bishops from around the world released a “fraternal open letter” to Germany’s bishops, warning that sweeping changes to Church teaching advocated by the process may lead to schism.
In March, an open letter from the Nordic bishops expressed alarm at the German process, and in February, a strongly-worded letter from the president of Poland’s Catholic bishops’ conference raised serious concerns.
Such concerns “will be repeated and reaffirmed and, if we do not heed them, will break the neck of the Synodal Way,” Kasper warned in his speech.
It was “the original sin of the Synodal Way” that it did not base itself on the pope’s letter to the Church in Germany, he said, with its “proposal of being guided by the Gospel and the basic mission of evangelization”.
Instead, the German process, initiated by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, “took its own path with partly different criteria”, Kasper said.