With the issuance of two re-cent Gallup polls on Americans’ belief in God and their views on morality, one could come to the conclusion that the United States could be in a heap of trouble.
One poll, issued June 15, found a record rating: Fully half of the survey’s respondents said they believe the country’s moral values are “poor.” And if that’s not enough, another 37% rated America’s moral values as “only fair,” and 78% said the nation’s morality is getting worse.
The other poll, released June 17, found that 81% of Americans believe in God. That’s an impressive number, until you realize that the percentage is the lowest ever recorded by Gallup when it has asked this question.
It’s down six percentage points from 2017. And according to Gallup, more than 90% of Americans believed in God between 1944 — when Gallup “first asked this question” — and 2011.
There are not a lot of polling organizations in the United States that focus on faith, religion and related matters. And one of the biggest, the Pew Research Cent-re, takes a hands-off policy when it comes to others’ findings.
“Pew Research Centre does not comment on research conducted/published by other pollsters or polling organizations,” said a June 23 email to Catholic News Service by Anna Schiller, senior communications manager for Pew’s research on religion and public life.

Pope Francis will beatify Pope John Paul 1 September 4 during a Mass at St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican Press Office has announced. Bishop Renato Marangoni will read the Rite of Beatification at the Mass, together with the Cardinal Beniamino Stella, po-stulator for the Cause of Canonization, and Stefania Falasca, the deputy postulator, the press office said.
Pope John Paul I was born as Albino Luciani in the northern Italian town of Forno di Canale (now Canale d’Agordo) on October 17, 1912.
“During the beatification, the team of postulators will gift the Holy Father with a reliquary containing the relics of the new Blessed,” according to the July 11 statement from the Press Office.
Ahead of the beatification, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis will preside over a prayer vigil in the Basilica of St. John Lateran on the evening of September 3.
The Pope’s Vicar General for the Diocese of Rome will celebrate the vigil in the Basilica which houses the Chair of the Bishop of Rome, of which John Paul I took possession on September 23, 1978.

Nigeria’s ruling party announced on July 10 that its ticket in the 2023 presidential election will not include a Christian, as presidential candidate Bola Tinubu selected Senator Kashim Shettima as his running mate in the 2023 general elections.
The announcement came less than a month after the Nigerian bishops’ conference warned that a ticket consisting only of Muslim candidates would further undermine national unity, amid years of bloody Christian persecution in the West African nation.
After the announcement Sunday, Christians expressed concern that ignoring the country’s custom of electing Muslims and Christians together could compound religious employment and property discrimination in the country.
Several high-profile members of the All Progressives Congress, Nigeria’s ruling party, having resigned their membership over the decision. The June 10 announcement was made in Daura, the hometown of President Muhammadu Buhari, who is leader of the APC. Buhari is term-limited and can not seek a third term in office.
With Catholic and other Christian leaders pushing back on the prospect that both Nigeria’s president and vice-president will be Muslims, the announcement has amplified division among Nigerians along religious lines, in a country where the fault lines of ethnicity and religion have claimed lives and livelihoods.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has 3 major religions, more than 400 languages and 250 ethnicities. Hundreds of Christians have been killed in the country in recent months, in terror attacks that have also seen more than a dozen priests kidnapped or killed.
Nigerian society is divided between a predominantly Muslim northern region and predominantly Christian southern areas. The country has customarily elected presidential tickets with one Muslim and one Christian candidate, usually representing both religious diversity and regional balance — a practice that many Nigerians believe has helped hold together a country with deep religious, regional, and economic rifts.

As Pope Francis’s native Argentina finds itself on the brink of hyperinflation and led by a president and vice president in a public dispute, the country’s bi-shops say the people are “starving,” hungry both in body and spirit.
“Today our homeland is a hungry, bewildered, worried and wounded people. Many families lack daily bread and decent work. Poverty has grown,” said Arch-bishop Carlos Alberto Sánchez of Tucuman on Saturday, July 9.
“There is hunger for justice and dignity, for respect and care for life in all its stages. There is hunger for social peace, respect for the constitution and authentic democracy.”
“There is hunger for dialogue, encounter and participation to overcome divisions and confrontations. There is a hunger for truth, for an education that puts the human person in first place, that does not impose ideologies, that leads to thinking and realizing oneself with dignity,” he said.
“There is a hunger for freedom and for a more secure and cordial life. There is a hunger for trust and joint work among all for the good of all. There is hunger for hope and consolation… There is hunger for fraternity and love,” saud Sánchez.

Pope Francis has urged the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Bishops to be shepherds of their flock and to be close to the faithful entrusted to their care, giving them courage and hope.
The Ukrainian Bishops are holding their annual Synod to discuss the theme of synodality in their Church. The meeting, running from 7-15 July, had to be moved from Kyiv to Przemysl, in Poland, due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. In a letter addressed to the Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), the Pope first of all reiterated his prayers and closeness to the Ukrainian people enduring the war waged by Russia against their country.

Europe’s top body of bishops has condemned the European Parliament’s favourable vote Thursday, July 7, on a resolution calling for access to abortion to be included in the E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The resolution, titled, “European Parliament resolution on the US Supreme Court decision to overturn abortion rights in the United States and the need to safeguard abortion rights and women’s heath in the EU,” also condemns the United States’ Supreme Court’s decision last month to overturn legislation protecting federal abortion rights.
The resolution was adopted with 324 votes in favour, 155 against, and 38 abstentions.
In a July 8 statement, Father Manuel Barrios Prieto, General Secretary of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE), voiced regret for the resolution, which he said, “paves the way for a deviation from universally recognized human rights and misrepresents the tragedy of abortion for mothers in difficulties.”

The Jesuits at the Vatican Observatory were wowed like most people by the beauty of the photos from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, but the director said they also are excited by the scientific information the telescope will reveal. “Such images are a necessary food for the human spirit — we do not live by bread alone — especially in these times,” said Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, the observatory director, after NASA released a first batch of images from what the space agency describes as “the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built.”
“The images are gorgeous, as anyone can see for themselves,” Consolmagno said. “It’s a tantalizing glimpse of what we’ll be able to learn about the universe with this telescope in the future.”
NASA described Webb’s mission as studying “every phase of 13.5 billion years of cosmic history — from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and every-thing in between.”
“The science behind this telescope is our attempt to use our God-given intelli-gence to understand the logic of the uni-verse,” Consolmagno said. “The universe wouldn’t work if it weren’t logical. But as these images show, the universe is not only logical, it is also beautiful.”
“This is God’s creation being revealed to us, and in it we can see both his astonishing power and his love of beauty,” the Jesuit said. The Vatican Observatory director also noted that “astronomy is a small field,” so he knows many of the scientists who helped build the instruments on the telescope and plan its observations.
Their years of effort, he said, “is a tribute to the power of the human spirit, what we can do when we work together.”
“And at the same time,” he said, “I am amazed and grateful that God has given us humans, his creation, the ability to see and understand what he has done.” Pointing to the telescope’s “first spectrum of water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet,” a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system, Consolmagno reminded readers of one of his Jesuit-scientist predecessors.