In the eastern province of Zhejiang, the government has put in force a set of regulations on centralized funeral arrangements, which bans priests from attending funeral prayers out-side a religious place, reported ucanews.com. The government claims the new rules aim to “get rid of bad funeral customs and establish a scientific, civilized and economical way of funerals.”

“Clerical personnel are not allowed to participate in funerals” at homes and “no more than 10 family members of the deceased are allowed to read Scriptures or sing hymns,” the rules state.

The new rules began to take effect recently, although enacted on Dec. 1, said a Catholic in Wenzhou Diocese in Zhejiang. The regulations strictly ban “religious activities outside religious places, so the priest will not be able to hold funeral prayers outside the church,” he told ucanews.com.

Huang Jian, also of Wenzhou, told ucanews.com priests could visit parishioners’ homes but could not conduct any religious ceremonies or prayers.

A priest identified only as Father Guo of Henan province said government officials have asked priests to strictly follow the new regulations on religious affairs. “Otherwise there would be penalties. The punishment could even be closing the church and canceling the priest’s priesthood certificate, letting the priest go home,” he said. But Father Peter Lee, a priest in eastern Shandong, told ucanews.com that government instructions had not come to him so far. “I still hold sacraments at the homes of dead parishioners. I sent a greeting to a church member from home to the cemetery. No one blocked it,” he said on Jan.30. “As a priest, we need to accompany church members to make them feel like everyone is a family. Particularly, baptisms and funerals are very important for families.”

Philippine prosecutors have exonerated four Catholic bishops charged with plotting to overthrow President Rodrigo Duterte and his administration.

The Justice Department dropped the charges, saying there was no evidence supporting police claims that the bishops intended to commit seditious acts.

The accused bishops were Archbishop Socrates Villegas, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, Bishop Honesto Ongtioco and Bishop Teodoro Bacani, retired prelate of Novaliches. Charges against Father Robert Reyes and La Salle Brother Armin Luistro were also dismissed.

Charges were, however, filed against Jesuit priest Albert Alejo and Divine Word priest Flaviano Villanueva and nine others for their involvement in the alleged plot to oust the president.

Bishop David of Kalookan said he was “both happy and sad” about the decision.

He said that while he welcomed the dropping of charges against him and the other church leaders, he was sad that prosecutors “found probable cause to indict the two priests.”

“I still hope and pray that the charges against them will also be dismissed soon by the courts,” he said in a post on social media.

The bishops’ conference earlier described the charges against the four Catholic bishops the priests, and several government critics as “beyond belief.”

Father Reyes said the charges were “a desperate move to suppress dissent.”

“The move is obviously meant to scare the hell out of these churchmen and eventually silence them,” said Father Jerome Secillano, chairman of the public affairs office of the bishops’ conference.

The charges stem from the release of a video that went viral on several social media last year that linked Duterte and his family to the illegal drug trade.

A visit from Pope Francis to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor may happen in September, according to an Indonesian Muslim leader who met with the pontiff mid January. Sheikh Yahya Cholil Staquf leads the 50 million member Nahdlatul Ulama movement, which calls for a reformed “humanitarian Islam” and has developed a theological framework for Islam that rejects the concepts of caliphate, Sharia law, and “kafir” (infidels).

Staquf met with the Pope, while in Rome for a meeting of the Abrahamic Faiths Initiative, which gathers Christians, Muslim and Jewish leaders to discuss the promotion of peace and fraternity. U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback attended the meetings.

Pope Francis met with the group on Jan. 15. After that meeting, Staquf told CNA that the Pope said he plans to visit Indonesia, East Timor, and New Guinea in September.

The Vatican has not yet confirmed such a trip. Indonesia is home to the largest population of Muslims in the world. The country’s 229 million Muslims make up more than 12% of the global Muslim population. Nearly all of Indonesia’s Muslims are Sunni.

There are 24 million Christians living in Indonesia, 7 million of them are Catholic. Pope St Paul VI visited the country in 1970, and Pope St John Paul II traveled there in 1989.

East Timor is a small country on the island of Timor. It gained independence from Indonesia in 1999, following decades of bloody conflict as the region vied for national sovereignty.

The country’s second president, Jose Manuel Ramos-Horta, shared the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with East Timorese Bishop Ximenes Bolo, for their efforts to reach a peaceful and just end to fighting in the country. Bishop Belo is now a missionary in Mozambique.

More than 1 million people live in East Timor; more than 98 percent Catholic. It is one of few majority Catholic countries in Southeast Asia. Pope St John Paul II visited East Timor in 1989.

The Catholic Church in South Korea has steadily grown over the past two decades according to a study by the Catholic Pastoral Institute of Korea (CPIK) of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea (CBCK). 11.1% of South Korea’s population.

The number of Catholics has increased by 48.6 per cent, from 3.9 million in 1999 to 5.8 million in 2018 and today they make up 11.1% of South Korea’s some 51 million population.

A copy of the study report sent to the Vatican’s Fides news agency shows the Diocese of Suwon leading with an increase of 89.1 per cent. It is followed by Daejeon (79.6 per cent) and Uijeongbu (78.9 per cent).

However, the year-to-year growth rate in the Catholic population has gradually slowed to below 1 per cent. In 2000-2001, the Catholic population grew 3.2 per cent and 3.9 per cent, respectively, before falling to the 2 per cent range until 2009. The growth rate dropped to 1.7 per cent in 2010 and briefly rebounded to 2.2 per cent in 2014 due to Pope Francis’ visit to South Korea. It then levelled off at around 1% per year.

As for the ratio of Catholics in the nation’s population, it rose from 8.3 per cent to 11.1 per cent in the 1999-2018 period.

Declining church attendance However, Sunday Mass attendance, considered a key indicator of faith life, has declined by about 10 points, from 29.5% to 18.3% during the past 2 decades.

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ingwen has written to Pope Francis to complain about China’s persecution of religion, saying that Beijing aims to threaten its democracy and freedom.

Taiwan has been concerned by the Vatican’s moves to normalize ties with China, especially after a landmark on September 2018 provisional deal on appointing bishops.
Tsai won reelection by a landslide on January 11 after a campaign pledge to protect Taiwan’s sovereignty from Chinese control.

In her letter to the Pope, released by the Presidential Office on Jan. 21, she listed Chinese actions that she said constitute abuses of power, including violence toward Hong Kong protesters and persecution of religious believers seeking to follow their faith.

Responding to a message from Pope Francis for World Day of Peace on Jan. 1, Tsai wrote that Taiwan hopes for a peaceful resolution of its differences with China.

“However, at present dialogue across the Taiwan Strait is filled with difficulties,” she wrote. “The main sticking point is that China has so far been unwilling to let go of its desire to control Taiwan. It continues to threaten Taiwan’s democratic freedoms and human rights by threatening to use force against Taiwan, fake news, cyber attacks and diplomatic means.”

Chinese-speaking people across the world are busy preparing to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which this year falls on Jan. 25. The festival marks the beginning of the Year of the Rat. Chinese Christians, of course, are part of the celebrations, composing and adapting the parallel sentences of greetings typical of the festival.

The expression “parallel sentences” needs a bit of explanation. Chinese alphabets allow the flexibility of writing sentences from top to bottom or left to right. During the Lunar New Year, the Chinese have a tradition of writing two-sentence greetings on two strips of paper, placed vertically on either side of a statue, picture or door. These couplets of greetings came to be known as parallel sentences.

Christians adapt these greetings and also compose their own. Sometimes they may vary among different denominations. In order to understand these sentences, we must return to the context in which these sentences are written. These greetings of four to 10 characters evoke a story, an affirmation of wisdom, or a blessing, corresponding to each other. Concise and poetic, their form and content are meant to reflect a certain beauty. Each sentence sounds like a maxim that highlights an idea; it translates and transports them. The parallel sentences are found in all regions and religious groups of the Chinese world.

China’s ruling Communist Party has fired a warning shot to the fast-growing underground Protestant Churches in the country by jailing Wang Yi, founder of Sichuan province’s Early Rain Covenant Church, for nine years after a secret trial where he had no legal representation. The US State Department has demanded his immediate release.

The sentence for “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business activities” became public on Dec. 29 when the court that convicted the preacher issued its judgment. He was found guilty during a closed-doors trial on Dec. 26 on what the State Department described as “trumped-up charges.” Pastor Yi and his wife Jiang Rong were arrested with dozens of other congregants on Dec. 9, 2018, during a crackdown on Cheng-du’s largest unregistered church.

Wang has been deprived of his political rights for three years and 50,000 yuan (US$7,160) of his personal property was confiscated as part of his sentencing. Jiang’s whereabouts remain unknown, although a congregant posted on the internet that she was being held under residential surveillance.

Hue Archdiocese in central Vietnam has kicked off a year of celebrations marking 170 years as a Catholic Church jurisdiction by honouring Mother Mary and thousands of people martyred in anti-Catholic purges.

An estimated 3,000 people attended the opening Mass on Jan. 1 to start the special year at Phu Cam Cathedral in Hue, the capital of Thua Thien Hue province.

Before the Mass, Archbishop Joseph Nguyen Chi Linh of Hue and Archbishop Marek Zalewski, the Vatican’s non-resident envoy to Vietnam, offered incense in front of a large statue of Our Mother of La Vang at the nearby Pastoral Centre.

Archbishop Linh, head of the Vietnamese bishops’ conference, said the special year with the theme “God is joy of youth” is “aimed at thanking God for loving us and giving us an opportunity to express our deep gratitude to our ancestors who protected and passed down the faith to us today.”

He said local Catholics would honor Mother Mary and appeal to her to continue supporting them as she protected their ancestors in La Vang from religious persecution in 1798.