Seated before a casket covered with flowers, Pope Francis attended the funeral of his personal physician, Dr Fabrizi Soccorsi, on Jan. 26.
The funeral Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, at the Church of Santa Maria Regina della Famiglia, which is in the Governor’s Palace inside Vatican City. Soccorsi, 78, had been admitted to Rome’s Gemelli hospital December 26 because of cancer, according to the Italian Catholic agency SIR.
However, he died Jan. 9 of “pulmonary complications” caused by COVID-19, the agency said, without providing further details.
Soccorsi had been the pope’s personal physician since 2015. He had also served as an adviser for the Vatican’s health services department and a consultant-physician to the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes.
He had been head physician of the hepatology ward in Rome’s San Camillo-Forlanini hospital and director of its department of liver diseases, the digestive system and nutrition; he also taught immunology at the municipal and regional medical schools.

A French nun who could potentially be the first woman to cast a vote in the Synod of Bishops said that her appointment is evidence the “clericalist mindset is changing” as more and more women assume high-level decision-making responsibilities in the Catholic hierarchy.
Sister Nathalie Becquart told journalists that Pope Francis has been underlining the importance of including women in the decision-making processes, helping move the Church from a clericalist attitude towards a more synodal one.
“How can we somehow end with a clerical Church, where there have been abuses, of power and other kind of abuses,” she asked, during a conference transmitted live from Rome via Zoom. “By being like Christ, by being at the service of others and accompanying others.” The Synod of Bishops is a product of the Second Vatican Council, and since the late 1960s it has been meeting in Rome semi-regularly to discuss a wide array of topics. It serves as an advisory body to the pope, with no actual decision-making power.
No woman has ever voted in one of these meetings, though they have regularly taken part as observers, advisers, auditors and experts. Becquart, appointed by Pope Francis as undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, could become the first woman to cast a vote. Though there’s no written rule that says the undersecretary does vote, it has been the tradition thus far. Furthermore, Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, told the Vatican’s in-house media that “a door has been opened” for her to vote in the upcoming synod, to be held in 2022, on the issue of synodality.
“We will then see what other steps could be taken in the future,” he said regarding the role of women in decision-making positions within the Church. But Becquart does not see her appointment as being about power, but rather, service: “Now that I have been appointed, the question is, how can I be of service? How can I use this authority for the service of the Church?”

Authorities in Romania are probing a Christian priest in connection with the death of a baby during the baptism ceremony of the child. The baby had died of a heart attack after the bishop had plunged the child’s head underwater three times during a baptism. According to reports, the six-week-old child’s lungs were filled up with water which led to a cardiac arrest. The incident occurred on February 1 in Suceava, northeast Romania. The baby was rushed to the hospital but died a few hours later following the incident.
A spokesperson of the hospital confirmed the death due to baptism saying, “A one-month-and-a-half baby was found in cardiac arrest in the church after the baptism service. The baby was respited by the SMURD unit that arrives on the spot.”
“He was hospitalized in serious condition in the hospital’s intensive care unit, was intubated and mechanically ventilated,” the spokesperson added. Reacting to the child’s death, the father of the child said, “The boy was crying but the priest submerged him three times in water and he inhaled water. [I] removed him, wiped him, from the doctors I found out he inhaled 110 ml of water… If you see a child with a gaping mouth and crying you wouldn’t immerse him completely in water, would you?” More than 80 percent of people in Romania are Orthodox and the church’s baptisms are big events comparable to weddings.

As of January 27, 360 clergymen, monks, and nuns of the Russian Orthodox Church are undergoing treatment for corona virus in Russia, Patriarch Kirill’s working group said on Wednesday. The overall number of clerics, monks, and nuns sick with corona virus halved on Wednesday as compared to the previous day, the Russian Orthodox Church said.
In total, 3,915 clergymen, monks, and nuns have come down with corona virus. The number of recoveries increased by 11 on Wednesday as compared to the previous day.
As of today, Russia has recorded 144 fatalities caused by complications of corona virus among clergymen, monks, and nuns. Of the 144 deceased, 14 are clergy from Moscow parishes.

A new survey from Lifeway Research found that less than half of Americans believe the nation’s churches are too segregated, yet most believe religious leaders play a “positive role” in improving race relations.
The survey of 1,200 Americans released found that 42% of U.S. adults believe “churches in America are too segregated,” while 36% disagree and 22% aren’t sure.
Americans are evenly split on the question of whether the nation has “come so far on racial relations,” with 46% agreeing and 46% disagreeing. However, white Americans are the most likely to say we’ve made significant progress (51%), while African Americans are the most likely to disagree (66%).
Overall, 38% of white Americans and 52% of black Americans believe churches are too segregated. When thinking about how to improve race relations, most Americans (57%) say religious leaders play a positive role.
In 2014, 74% of Americans agreed the nation has “come so far on racial relations.” The newest survey found a 28-point decline on that question.
Most Americans (58%) say race relations grew “more strained” after former President Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Eighteen percent say race relations stayed the same, while 11 percent say they improved.
Nearly seven in 10 Americans (69%) say racial diversity is good for the country, while just one-quarter (23%) say it is not.

On Jan. 14, at least 46 people belonging to the Pygmy ethnic group were killed in Ituri province by suspected militants of the extremist group, which is known for attacking, kidnapping, and killing Christians, as well as training and sending jihadists to other countries in Africa.
The roughly half a million Pygmy people face extensive persecution and discrimination in the country, Open Doors noted.
On Jan. 4, about 22 civilians were estimated to be killed with guns and machetes in an over-night attack on Mwenda village in the Beni region of neighboring North Kivu province.
Militants from the Allied Democratic Forces, which is based in neighboring Uganda, killed 25 more people in Tingwe village in the same region the same day.
At least 17 nearby villagers had been murdered with machetes a week earlier in Mwenda village.
The majority of those killed in the three attacks in the Beni region were Christians.
Islamic extremist groups have “a clear Islamic expansionist agenda,” Illia Djadi, an Open Doors spokesperson on freedom of religion or belief in sub-Saha-ran Africa, said. “It is a reminder of what is happening in other parts of the central Sahel region – groups like Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria, for example. The ideology, the agenda of establishing a ‘caliphate’ in the region, and the way they operate is the same, and we can see how they afflict terrible suffering on innocent people.”

“Live Lent as a path of conversion, prayer and sharing of our goods.” This is the invitation that Pope Francis makes in his message for Lent this year, which has as its theme “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem …” (Mt 20:18),
The Lenten journey, Francis recalls, is a time of conversion in which “renew our faith, draw from the “living water” of hope, and receive with open hearts the love of God, who makes us brothers and sisters in Christ”. “Fasting, prayer and almsgiving, as preached by Jesus (cf. Mt 6:1-18), enable and express our conversion. The path of poverty and self-denial (fasting), concern and loving care for the poor (almsgiving), and childlike dialogue with the Father (prayer) make it possible for us to live lives of sincere faith, living hope and effective charity.”
The renewed faith “calls us to accept the truth and testify to it before God and all our brothers and sisters. In this Lenten season, accepting and living the truth revealed in Christ means, first of all, opening our hearts to God’s word, which the Church passes on from generation to generation.” A truth that “is not an abstract concept reserved for a chosen intelligent few. Instead, it is a message that all of us can receive and understand thanks to the wisdom of a heart open to the grandeur of God, who loves us even before we are aware of it. Christ himself is this truth. By taking on our humanity, even to its very limits, he has made himself the way – demanding, yet open to all – that leads to the fullness of life.”
Fasting, then, “experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him” and fasting “involves being freed from all that weighs us down – like consumerism or an excess of information, whether true or false – in order to open the doors of our hearts to the One who comes to us, poor in all things, yet “full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14): the Son of God our Saviour.”

The more children you have, the less you can give each one, and the worse they do. Right? Parents in pandemic isolation without the usual supports from schools, churches, and extended family will certainly resonate with the idea that their time, energy, and attention are split into ever-smaller slices with each child.
It’s also the tradeoff anthropologists and economists have assumed when studying modern fertility patterns. But when John Shaver came across projections during his graduate studies that Hispanic Catholics and Muslims were on track to surpass white Christian subgroups and Jews, respectively, by the midcentury, he was perplexed.
“It struck me as a puzzle,” said Shaver, who now teaches anthropology and religion at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “These groups may be growing rapidly, but if there’s not something there to mitigate the negative effects of large family size, these could be populations where the children in these groups are not functioning as well.”
But when Shaver investigated himself, he found that when families had support from religious communities, like churches, this negative scenario didn’t always play out.
Shaver and his colleagues recently published a paper exploring the effects of religious support on fertility and child development. They used ten years of data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which recruited over 14,000 pregnant women in England in the early 1990s to track ever since—on measures such as children’s lead exposure to number of illnesses to developmental ups and downs. From this data they tested how church attendance and social support affected family size and child development.