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Removing Satan from Pakistan parishioners’ pockets

The colourful posters advertising the annual Marian pilgrimage are plastered across Tera village in Pakistan, but they come with an unusual prohibition. “Photographing or videotaping on mobile phones is prohibited. We are all obliged to respect the holy venue. The incoming guests for pilgrimage are requested to observe the SOPs [standard operating procedures],” state notices […]

Papuans pay the price of graft in Indonesia

A multimillion-dollar graft scandal involving high-ranking leaders in conflict-torn Papua has drawn a public backlash and further impoverished people traumatized by decades of violence. Indonesia’s anti-graft agency confirmed last month a corruption scandal involving Papua’s top man — Governor Lukas Enembe. He allegedly embezzled around US$36 million of state funds aimed to advance people’s welfare. […]

‘Nobody dares speak out’: Chinese writer forced into exile

Murong Xuecun was one of the brightest stars of China’s literary scene, his novels offering searing critiques of contemporary social issues that few other writers dared to imitate. But after a decade of diminishing freedom of speech under President Xi Jinping, he could not publish in his own country and was eventually forced into exile. […]

Families grieve for Thai nursery dead

Weeping, grief-stricken families gathered on October 7 out-side a Thai nursery where an ex-policeman murdered nearly two dozen children in one of the kingdom’s worst mass killings. Thai King Maha Vajiralong-korn and Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha will later visit survivors of the attack that left at least 37 people dead, including the attacker’s wife and […]

Priests demand fair trials in Indonesia’s Papua region

More than 100 Catholic priests have signed a petition seeking fair trials in cases of violence, including sensational murders, as a way of peace-building in Indonesia’s restive Christian-majority Papua re-gion. The petition includes a five-point declaration which was adopted during a meeting of 106 diocesan priests from all five dioceses in the region in Agats, […]

A social development quest in Timor-Leste

In 2015, when Father Hwang Seokmo ended his term as the director of the headquarters of his religious order in Seoul, he requested the superior send him as a missionary to Timor-Leste. The 57-year-old priest, a member of the South Korea-based Clerical Congregation of the Blessed Korean Martyrs, said the tiny Catholic-majority country, also known […]

Cardinal Müller on Synod on Synodality: ‘A Hostile Takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ …We Must Resist’

A top cardinal raised concerns about how his fellow prelates understand the nature of the Church and treat papal authority. “The theory of the Pope as autocrat, borrowed from 19th century Jesuit theology, not only contradicts the Second Vatican Council, but undermines the credibility of the Church with this caricature of the Petrine ministry,” Cdl. Gerhard Müller told Spanish […]

Belo sex allegations test Timor Church’s mettle

Cardinal Virgilio do Carmo da Silva of Dili, Timor-Leste’s first archbishop who was named a cardinal in August, is set for a baptism of fire that will test his every fibre and that of his countrymen. A credible allegation of sexually abusing minors has been made against one of Cardinal da Silva’s predecessors — the […]