Groups representing Christians in northeast Syria are appeal-ing for prayer, fearful that Turkey plans to make good its numerous threats to invade the region with its military forces.

Since November 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch a large military operation east of the Euphrates River to “clear Kurdish terrorists” from the area. Syriac Christians view it as a pretext to enter more of Syria in a bid to change the Northeast’s demographic of Kurds and Christians, just as Turkey did in Afrin, Syria, in March 2018.

The Christians’ appeal was issued by the Syriac National Council of Syria, the Syriac Union Party, and the American Syriac Union. It was made available to Catholic News Service on August 15.

Turkey has “massed its army and allied jihadists along the border. Even though the U. S. and French armies are present in northeast Syria, we know that Turkey will attack and destroy us,” the three Syriac Christian groups said. They are appealing to U. S. leaders to intervene on their behalf to aid the 100,000 Christians in the region who they say are at risk.

They warned that Turkey and its jihadist allies, including fighters from al-Qaida and Islamic State, could carry out “a massacre just as they did in Afrin (northwest Syria) in 2018, when the churches of Afrin were burned and the Christians and Yazidis there were hunted down. In northeast Syria, it would be much worse and destroy many more people.”

On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, a German archbishop has called for a stand against hubris and arrogance of those in political power.

Speaking on the occasion of a Mass in the former Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz on August 14, Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg recalled the witness of the Polish martyr and saint Fr Maximilian Kolbe.

“On the anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, Maximilian Kolbe reminds us to profess that God is the Almighty to whom all must submit for peace and unity in our world today,” Archbishop Schick said.

“No person can put themselves above God, and no nation can put itself above another, the German prelate stressed, adding that the most important contribution of Christians to peace and unity among peoples and nations was “to profess the one and only benevolent God, the Father of all creation.”

God gives equal dignity and rights to all people, peoples and nations, and imposes the same duties of charity on all, Schick said, adding that St Maximilian Kolbe had deeply committed himself to the obligation of charity.

The Polish priest resisted the totalitarian terror of Nazi ideology and was incarcerated in Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1941, he gave his life for a fellow prisoner. He was brutally executed after suffering starvation in a hunger bunker.

The superior general of the Society of Jesus said on August 21 that the devil is a symbol, but not a person.

The devil, “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Fr Arturo Sosa, SJ, said on August 21 in an interview with Italian magazine Tempi.

“Good and evil are in a permanent war in the human conscience and we have ways to point them out. We recognize God as good, fully good. Symbols are part of reality, and the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality,” he added.

Sosa’s remarks came after he participated in a panel discussion at a Catholic gathering in Rimini, Italy, organized by the Commu-nion and Liberation ecclesial movement.

The Catechism of the Catholic teaches that ”Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: ‘The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing. ’”

Angels, the Catechism says, are “spiritual, non-corporeal beings.”

“They are personal and immortal creatures,” it adds, who “have intelligence and will.”

Pope Francis has called for a joint effort by the international community to stop the fires raging in the Amazon rainforest and protect a region he describes as a “vital lung” of the world.

Speaking after praying the Angelus in St Peter’s Square, the 82-year-old Latin American Pope pointed to the global concern for the “vast fires” in the Amazon praying that through a cross-national commitment they “might be contained as soon as possible.”

Leaders of the world’s major democracies are discussing how to contain the wildfires during their G7 gathering in Biarritz, France. Ireland and France have both threatened to block a free trade agreement between the EU and Latin American Countries if Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro does not change his Amazon policy. Experts believe that the populist leader’s removal of rainforest protections, allowing for deforestation, have fuelled the fires.

For his part, the Pope will host a landmark Synod of bishops gathering on the Amazon in Rome from 6-27 October 2019, which will focus on how the Church can help protect region’s environment and indigenous peoples.

The Pope’s Amazon appeal came after one by the Latin American Bishops.

Responding to criticism of notes he published about the roots of the clerical sexual abuse crisis, retired Pope Benedict XVI said the fact that the critiques barely mentioned God proved his point.

“As far as I can see, in most reactions to my contribution, God does not appear at all,” which is “exactly what I wanted to emphasize” as the central problem, he wrote in a brief note to Herder Korrespondenz, according to KNA, the German Catholic news agency.

In April, the retired Pope sent a compilation of what he described as “some notes” on the crisis to Klerusblatt, a German-language Catholic monthly journal for clergy in Bavaria.

Seeing the crisis as rooted in the “egregious event” of the cultural and sexual revolution in the Western world in the 1960s and a collapse of belief in the existence and authority of absolute truth and God, the retired Pope said the primary task at hand is to reassert the joyful truth of God’s existence and of the Church as holding the true deposit of faith.

Most of the criticism, though, focused on Benedict seeming to blame the cultural and sexual revolution of the ’60s, especially when many cases of priests sexually abusing children occurred before that time even if the public found out only recently.

Do Catholics believe that the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ? A Pew Research Centre survey released on Aug. 5 found that nearly 70% of Catholics believe that the bread and wine used for Communion during Mass are “symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ,” while about 30% believe that the bread and wine “actually become” Christ’s body and blood.

The findings clearly touched a nerve as commentators jumped to analyse the data, questioning the language that Pew had used in its survey questions.

Mark Gray from the centre for the Applied Research in the Apostolate wrote in a blog post that replacing the word “actually” with “really” might have led to different results. In previous surveys on the Real Presence, CARA used “Jesus is really present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist” vs. “Bread and wine are symbols of Jesus, but Jesus is not really present.” Others found the results an affirmation of their belief that catechesis in the Church is in a sorry state.

“It represents a massive failure – and I include myself in this, we’re all guilty – a massive failure on the part of Catholic educators and catechists, evangelists, teachers,” said Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert E. Barron in a “Word on Fire” YouTube video. “If on this central matter of our belief and practice there is this much deep misunderstanding, something has gone substantially wrong.”

Pew’s finding “certainly shows a failure in catechetics, but I think the Church faces a greater problem,” Jesuit Father Thomas Reese wrote in a column for Religion News Service. “Catholics have an impoverished idea of what the Eucharist is really about.”