This year marks one hundred years since the Council of Shanghai, the first Plenary Council of the Church in China. For the occasion, the Pontifical Urbaniana University in cooperation with the Agenzia Fides organised a conference, which was held today, to highlight the historic event a century ago, but also to look at today’s challenges, starting with the notion of “sinicisation” of religions, an issue central to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s religious policy.
Pope Francis also underlined the importance of the council in 1924, which brought together the bishops and apostolic prefects present in China at the time, in a video message.
A lot of curiosity surrounded the first official visit in Rome of the current bishop of Shanghai, Msgr Joseph Shen Bin, at the centre of tensions last year after Chinese authorities unilaterally transferred him to China’s foremost epis-copal see, a situation later settled by Pope Francis’s decision to appoint him as well.
Bishop Shen was joined by important academics and Church officials from the People’s Republic of China, who brought their vision of what happened a century ago, as well as their views about the relationship between the “inculturation” of the faith promoted by the doctrine of the Church and “sinicisation”, processes seen as two circles that overlap but also diverge.
This also comes with the need for dialogue in the perspective of fraternity to avoid the risk of fuelling “new self-referential closures”, as Card Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation, put it this in his conclusion. “The stories of our Chinese brothers and sisters have something important to show to the universal Church,” Card Tag-le said. “There may be misunderstandings, but [they are] never half-hearted with respect to the Church’s journey in China.”

Instruments and institutions at the service of the disabled. And permits for the construction of two new churches in the archdioceses of Jakarta and Pelambang. These are the new projects put in place in agreement with the local Church by the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs, through its Directorate for Catholics (Bimas Katolik Kemenag), presented in a meeting held with the Bishops’ Conference.
In particular, the government will take care of the dissemination of a Braille translation of the Gospel of Mark for the visually impaired and the establishment of two Catholic high schools to train catechists prepared to serve the disabled in the district of Nagekeo, located on the island of Flores, in eastern Nusa Tenggara province, and on the island of Nias, in Sumatra province.
‘Our agency has a primary focus on the neglected people in the remote areas of the country,’ explained the Director of the Directorate for Catholics, Mr Supraman, ‘providing a financial aid package to establish or renovate places of worship and to procure essential tools for apostolate in education or other areas. The project for the disabled is being carried out in cooperation with the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Expressing his thanks, the President of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Antonius Subianto of Bandung, commented: ’We really have things in common: the good spirit of helping others, especially the neglected people.

The Holy See Press Office has released the official logos and mottos for the Pope’s upcoming visit to Asia. The Pope’s journey to the continent – which will include stops in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, and Singapore – is scheduled to take place on September 2-13, 2024.
Pope Francis will land in Jakarta, Indone-sia, on September 3, remaining until the 6th.
The logo for this visit features the Pope with his hand raised in blessing, standing in front of a golden “Garuda”, a sacred eagle, which has been depicted in a manner reminiscent of traditional Indonesian “batik” fabric. Inlaid is a map of Indonesia, an archipelago characterized by a great variety of ethnic and social groups, languages, cultures and religious beliefs. The Apostolic Journey has been given the motto ‘Faith – Fraternity – Compassion’.
Next, the Pope will travel to Papua New Guinea, where he will remain until Sept. 9.
The centrepiece of the logo for this visit is a cross, depicted in colours meant to evoke Papua New Guinea’s sunrises and sunsets. On the cross, a Bird of Paradise, symbolising Papua New Guinea, can be seen. The motto for this Apostolic Journey is “Pray”, inspired by the disciples’ request to Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk 11:1).
From Papua New Guinea, Pope Francis will travel to Timor Leste, remaining until September 11. In the centre of the logo for this journey, we see Pope Francis with his hand raised in blessing. Behind him is the globe, from which a map of Timor Leste emerges. Above, written in an arc, is the motto of the papal visit, “May your faith be your culture”, an exhortation to the Timorese people to live out their faith according to their culture and traditions.
The Pope’s final stop will be the island nation of Singapore, which he will visit on September 11-13. The logo for this Apostolic Journey depicts a stylized cross, inspired by the star that guided the Magi, by the Eucharist and by the five stars of the flag of Singapore. On either side of the Cross is the motto of the Apostolic Journey: “Unity–Hope.”

Catholic students from Pamulang University (UNPAM) were threatened by Muslim extre-mists as they prepared to pray the rosary. A group of armed Mus-lim men broke into the home of a Catholic family in South Tange-rang[I] that was hosting students. Shouting threats, the attackers ordered the university students to stop the prayer activity and dis-perse as soon as possible.
It seems that the hostilities were fomented by a man called Diding. “If you perform any praying, do it in your church as we local Muslims are used to do it in our mosque; not in a resi-dential house like this,” Mr Di-ding said, according to witnesses. “A dozen UNPAM students were reciting the rosary at the home of a local Catholic,” said a political activist known as Mr A. “We were at the police’s command post until at 3 am to demand perpe-trators be held accountable for last night’s hostile deed,” Mr A told. Speaking to local media, Chief Superintendent Alvino Cahyadi said police were looking into the case after a video about the incident was posted on social media. Some female students suffered minor injuries.
A similar incident took place in 2014, when Julianus Felicianus, a Catholic, opened his home to the community near Yogyakarta to pray the rosary, an activity that many Christians engage in, in the month of May. A group of Mus-lims targeted the Catholic gather-ing and Felicianus received threats, including death threats, from several people.

Exactly one year after his historic visit to Beijing in April 2023 (almost 30 years after the last one), a delegation of the Diocese of Hong Kong led by Card Stephen Chow Sau-yan made a new, important visit to Catholic communities in mainland China.
From 22 to 26 April, the Chinese cardinal – together with Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Ha Chi-shing, Vicar General Fr Peter Choy Wai-man, and a small group of priests and lay people involved in pastoral care – travelled to Guangdong province where they held meetings in the dioceses of Guangzhou and Shantou as well as the Church of Shenzhen.
This is a very significant aspect of the task of building bridges, the cardinal laid out in his ministry for the Church of Hong Kong. Guangzhou and Shenzhen are large metropolises in southern China. With Hong Kong, they constitute the huge metropolitan area of the Pearl River Delta, which are increas-ingly becoming a single commu-nity through large-scale infra-structural development under-taken by Beijing.
For Card Chow, this was his first visit to these dioceses and on his return he relayed his impre-ssions to the diocesan weekly Sunday Examiner. He said, for example, that he was struck by the large number of parishes that a priest has to serve in China, citing as an example two parish priests who serve 31 parishes in Shantou.

South Asia and Southeast Asia have been facing an exceptional heat wave, which in several countries has caused the mercury to rise above 40 degrees Celsius, with peaks of up to 45.
From Bangladesh to Thailand, passing through vast regions of India, Myanmar, Cambodia and the Philippines, there have been casualties due to the high temperatures. Governments have run for cover by decreeing the closure of schools. But there is also another aspect on which it becomes particularly significant to dwell on this day of 1 May: the effect that increasingly prohibitive weather conditions have on the world of work.
It was precisely to the incidence of this problem in the countries now affected by the exceptional heat wave that the Global Labour Institute, the research institute of the American University of Cornell that analyses working conditions in the supply chains of global markets, devoted an interesting study a few months ago. Entitled ’A Higher Level? The Climate Crisis, the World of Fashion and its Effects on Workers’, the survey deals with the impact of two phenomena such as rising temperatures and increasingly frequent flooding on the lives of workers in the textile and footwear industries in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan and Vietnam, four countries that alone account for 18% of world production in these sectors.
They come to an extremely alarming conclusion: without adequate mitigation measures, not only will the health of local workers become more and more at risk every day, but also the very productivity of the companies is destined to collapse, with the real risk of a ‘cut and run’ approach that would entail very high social costs.

The closing session of the diocesan phase of the process of beatification of Fr Benoît Thu­n (1880-1933) came to an end today in the Lateran Palace. This is a “moment of celebration for the whole Church” in Rome as well as in Vietnam, said Bishop Baldassare Reina, the vicegerent of the Diocese of Rome.
Born Henri François Denis, the French missionary arrived in Vietnam in 1903 where he founded in 1918 the monastery of Our Lady of Annam in PhýÛc Sõn, Archdiocese of Hu¿, the country’s first male monastic community.
As required by canon law, the documentation concerning the holiness of this servant of God still highly venerated in Vietnam were sealed and handed over to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, in a ceremony attended by Dom Mauro Giuseppe Lepori, Abbot General of the Cistercian Order, and Dom John XXIII, Abbot President of the Cistercian Congregation of the Holy Family, the branch founded in Vietnam by Fr Benoît Thu­n.
A native of Boulogne-sur-Mere (France), Fr Henri François Denis was ordained a priest for the Mission Étrangères de Paris on 7 March 1903. He left for Vietnam a few months later, assigned to the mission in Hu¿, where he took the name Thu­n, which in Vietnamese means obedience.
He adapted to the local culture, interacting with people to serve them, without any air of superiority. Eventually, as he pursued his missionary apostolate, he felt strongly called to bear witness to the Gospel with a monastic style.