The bishop emeritus of Hong Kong has spoken out forcefully against the Vatican’s newest “pastoral document” for the Chinese Church which gives reasons for why priests should register with the Communist government.

Joseph Cardinal Zen presented nine criticisms to Pope Francis and Pietro Cardinal Parolin on a recent trip to Rome, on July 1, that outline his concerns about the document.

“A text is signed against the faith and it is stated that the intention is to promote the good of the community, a more suitable evangelization, and the responsible management of Church assets. This general rule is obviously against all fundamental moral theology! If valid, [it] would justify even apostasy!” stated the cardinal in his criticisms which were published on his website on July 5.

“This document has radically turned upside what is normal and what is abnormal, what is rightful and what is pitiable. Those who wrote it hope perhaps that the pitied minority will die a natural death. By this minority I mean not only underground priests, but also the many brothers in the official community who have worked with great tenacity to achieve change, hoping for the support of the Holy See,” he stated later in his criticism of the pastoral document.

Cardinal Zen had been deeply involved in the recent protests that opposed the Chinese state imposition of extradition laws in Hong Kong. Many believe these laws would continue the methodical takeover of the former British colony, now acting as an independent “Special Administrative Region.”

His absence, however, was noted in the recent protests. In his statement, issued the morning of July 5, His Eminence explained what caused him to remain silent.

“On the evening of June 28, he received notice (that) the Holy See (had issued the newest pastoral document for the Church in China). As a bishop and a cardinal, I cannot accept this quietly. I must raise my doubts. It was (for this purpose) that I boarded a plane to Rome on the evening of the 29th.”

Leaders of Vietnam’s most active archdiocese have urged local Catholics to follow church instructions on worship and avoid deviant ritual practices claimed to caste out evil spirits.

Bishop Joseph Do Manh Hung, apostolic administrator of Ho Chi Minh City Archdiocese in the communist nation’s south, and Auxiliary Bishop Louis Nguyen Anh Tuan, said some local Catholics have adopted unsuitable practices. They warned people against Mother Mary’s Message, a Marian devotion movement launched by a lay man named Thomas Mary Nguyen Thanh Viet. It has been claimed that Mother Mary healed him of illnesses in 2010.

A senior church official has called on Philippine legislators to work for the welfare of the people and not blindly follow what President Rodrigo Duterte wants, which is to bring back the death penalty.

Rodolfo Diamante, executive secretary of the Episcopal Commission on Prison Pastoral Care, urged members of Congress “not to pass measures just to please the president.”

The call was made after the president said during his State of the Nation address on July 22 that he wanted capital punishment reinstated.

Duterte appealed to Congress to reinstate the death penalty for “heinous crimes related to illegal drugs and plunder.”

Diamante appealed to legislators to study whether the death penalty would solve the problem of illegal drugs.

“We urge them to study this thoroughly and determine if it would really address the problems of drug trafficking and plunder,” he said.

An Irish nun who has worked tirelessly to educate youngsters in Pakistan has been honoured in Britain.

At the St Mary’s University graduation ceremony at West-minster Cathedral on July 17, Cardinal Vincent Nichols presented the Benedict Medal, the university’s highest honour, to Sister Berchmans Conway in recognition of a lifetime’s teaching and promoting interfaith relations. The cardinal is the arch-bishop of Westminster and chancellor of St Mary’s.

Born in Ireland in 1930, Sister Berchmans joined the Convent of Jesus and Mary in 1951 in Willesden, London, and has spent over 65 years teaching, mostly in Pakistan, where she has taught students of different faiths at the Convents of Jesus and Mary in Lahore, Murree and Karachi.

Among her pupils were Benazir Bhutto, the first female Muslim Prime Minister in the world, and astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala. Calling Sister Berchmans “a constant inspiration to many generations of teachers and students,” Cardinal Nichols said in his homily that she “is a shining example of all that is to be found at the heart of Catholic education: not a narrow self-interest but a radical openness to our human family.”

Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brown-back said that the Vatican’s agreement with China on the appointment of bishops ought to be made public so that it can be evaluated.

“It certainly seems to me that it’s in everybody’s interest for the agreement to be made public so that people can appraise it and it can be subject to the light of day and people understand what the parameters of it are,” Brown-back told journalists via conference call on July 12.

The deal, reached last Sept-ember, is believed to allow both Chinese officials and the Pope have to say on which bishops are named. However, the details of the agreement have not been made public, a fact that has been widely criticized.

During a visit to Hong Kong in March, Brownback said the deal had set a poor precedent for government interference with other religious communities, including Tibetan Buddhism and other Christian denominations.

The Vatican has told bishops and priests in China that they must follow their own consciences in deciding whether to register with the government, and it urged Catholics in the country not to judge them for the choices they make.

The problem, the Vatican said, is that registration almost always requires the bishop or priest to accept “the principle of independence, autonomy and self-administration of the Church in China,” which could be read as a denial of one’s bonds with the Pope and the universal Church.

Releasing the “pastoral guidelines of the Holy See concerning the civil registration of clergy in China” on June 28, the Vatican acknowledged that acceptance of the independence of the Church in China comes despite “the commitment assumed by the Chinese authorities,” in an agreement with the Vatican in September, to respect Catholic doctrine. Deciding whether to register with the government, which is the only way to be able to minister openly, is a choice that is “far from simple,” the guidelines said.

“All those involved — the Holy See, bishops, priests, religious men and women and the lay faithful — are called to discern the will of God with patience and humility on this part of the journey of the Church in China, marked, as it is, by much hope but also by enduring difficulties.”

The guidelines assured Chinese clergy that the Vatican “continues to dialogue with the Chinese authorities” to find “a formula that, while allowing for registration, would respect not only Chinese laws but also Catholic doctrine.”

In the meantime, however, the guidelines said, “if a bishop or a priest decides to register civilly, but the text of the declaration required for the registration does not appear respectful of the Catholic faith, he will specify in writing, upon signing, that he acts without failing in his duty to remain faithful to the principles of Catholic doctrine.”

When deliberating over whether or not to become a priest, Kinley Tshering – an extremely rare Catholic convert in his native Bhutan – asked God for a sign.

The sign came on an ensuing airplane flight when he discovered he was sitting next to Mother Teresa (now St Teresa of Calcutta). He soon joined the Jesuit Order and in 1995 became the first Catholic priest born in Bhutan – a landlocked South Asian country, surrounded by India and China, with a total population of about 800,000, some three-fourths of whom are Buddhists; most of the remaining one-fourth are Hindus, and Christians account for less than 1% of the population.

As a devout Buddhist family, Tshering’s parents actually took him as an infant to a monastery and dedicated him as a Buddhist monk. And yet he proceeded to receive a Catholic education. He tells how, as a small child in the early 1960s, “there weren’t many good schools in Bhutan.” So his family sent him to Catholic boarding schools in Darjeeling, India.

He proceeded to work in the business industry. But something about his conventional way of life left him unsatisfied and he continued to deliberate about becoming a priest.

For a long time, he had been praying to God to give him a sign to let him know that he should enter the priestly vocation.

Pope Francis has appointed a Sri Lankan as the secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID).

Monsignor Indunil Janakaratne Kodithuwakku Kankanamalage, currently the under-secretary of the council, is a priest of the Diocese of Badulla, Sri Lanka.

Monsignor Indunil was born in 1966 of a Buddhist mother who converted on marrying a Catholic. Two years after his priestly ordination on December 16, 2000, he was sent to Rome where he obtained a doctorate in missiology from the Pontifical Urban University. The university later hired him as a professor at its Faculty of Missiology.

On June 12, 2012. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

Monsignor Indunil succeeds previous secretary, Spanish Bish-op Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, whom Pope Francis on May 25 appointed the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, following the death of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran on July 5, 2018.

The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue was established by Paul VI on Pentecost Sunday 1964, with the aim of promoting dialogue with persons of other religions, in line with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, especially its declaration, “Nostra Aetate.”

Thai authorities in Bangkok have arrested 51 Pakistani Christian asylum seekers in an incident that has reignited fears among the city’s Christian refugees of another immigration crack-down on illegal immigrants.

According to eyewitnesses, immigration authorities arriving in two police vans pulled up outside a low-rent apartment building in Bearing Soi 7 in eastern Bangkok where several Pakistani Christian families had been hiding out after having overstayed their tourist visas to Thailand.

Likely acting on a tip off from a disgruntled local, immigration police knocked on selected doors around 7 a.m. on July 8. When the fearful residents failed to respond, officers battered the doors down with hammers.

They then proceeded to round up entire families and take them to Bangkok’s notorious Immigration Detention Centre where inmates languish, often indefinitely, in squalid and overcrowded cells.

“They took everyone — men, women, old people, young children,” a Pakistani Christian asylum seeker who was privy to the incident via a phone connection told ucanews.com. “They even took sick old people who can’t walk anymore.”

When several Christian asylum seekers seemed reluctant to leave the apartments, immigration officers allegedly manhandled them, including mothers in front of their crying children.

“The officers roughed up some people, even women,” a Pakistani Christian told ucanews.com. “They took some of my friends. I’m very concerned about them.”

As evidence of the incident, Pakistani Christians showed off images, taken with mobile phones, of plywood doors bashed in and numerous Pakistani refugees, including a distraught elderly woman, being taken away in police vans.