An Indian priest on June 11 took over as the chief content editor of Radio Veritas Asia, a pan-Asian radio service of the Catholic bishops of Asia.
Fr Feroz Fernandes, a member of the Society of Missionaries of St. Francis Xavier or better known as Society of Pilar, was the editor-in-chief of a Konkani weekly “Vaura-ddeancho Ixtt” (Worker’s Friends), Goa, western India, from 2008 to 2013.

Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as a new member of the Vatican body that supports the Eastern Catholic Churches throughout the world. The cardinal is the sole addition to the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, which also assists the Latin-rite Catholic dioceses of the Middle East. Cardinal Tagle is the current prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples or Propaganda Fide, which oversees the church’s vast “mission territories.” Formerly known as the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, it began as part of the Propaganda Fide, established by Pope Pius IX in 1862.

In the first five months of 2021, in 151 days of the current year, despite the serious pan-demic situation, 127 episodes of violence against Christians took place in India: says to Agenzia Fides “United Chri-stian Forum” (UCF), reporting the data obtained from the special “Toll-free number”, a telephone line activated to monitor incidents of violence against the faithful in the country.
Among the complaints registered on the toll-free num-ber by Indian Christian citizens, there are attacks by mobs or threats and intimida-tion of various kinds, for reasons of religious affiliation.
“Furthermore, there is a tendency not to file the First Information Report (FIR), the official complaint handed to the police, which was presented only in 15 cases out of 127 episodes of violence”, notes to Fides A.C. Michael, a lay Catholic and leader of the UCF.
According to data sent to Fides, the state of Chhattis-garh, in central India, leads the count of the largest number of accidents (19), while 17 cases occurred in Karnataka and Jharkhand. Religious violence, it highlights, can be exacerbated by the conditions of poverty and destitution caused by the pandemic, across the national territory.
555 women, 120 dalits and 189 tribals were injured in these incidents. The incidents of religious violence, notes the UCF “have become so com-mon that no one feels the need to condemn them anymore, including political, civil society and religious leaders”, says Michael, signaling the danger of indifference.
Thanks to the interventions of lawyers and volunteers who provide free legal and social assistance, in the first six months of the current year 28 places of worship or prayer meetings have been reopened while 66 Christian faithful arrested by the police have been released. UCF, based in New Delhi, is an organization that promotes fundamental and civil rights and is an interfaith Christian body that fights for the rights of the Christian mi-nority. It works with network partners such as Alliance Defending Freedom India, Religious Liberty Commission of Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) and Christian Legal Association.

The diocese of Miao on June 6 launched a campaign to mark the World Environment Day. At small event held at Christ the Light Minor Semi-nary, Bp George Pallippara-mbil of Miao inaugurated the “Mitthi Sona Hai” (Earth is Gold) campaign to make people self-sufficient by encouraging them to cultivate and produce their food.
Celebrating the World En-vironment Day 2021 with the diocesan minor seminarians, the Salesian prelate said, “The Earth is gold and it has every-thing for everyone. We only need to till it and discover it.”
The campaign aims at making every parish in the diocese to produce its vegeta-bles and fruits.
Quoting the creation story of the Bible, the bishop said, “God asks us to subdue the earth and not subjugate it. It calls for free and equal co-existence with the nature. We are to be friends to the mother earth and not its master.”

“While scrolling through my social media feed, my eyes fixed upon the troubled reflection of innocent angel Sunita Masih. She was staring back at me with helpless orbs. Her eyes betrayed the discomfort of humiliation and, without even uttering a single syllable, she proclaimed the tale of injustice through her misery-laced expression” reports Anee Muskan from Pakistan. Sunita, a 14-year-old Christian girl, was raped, molested, beaten and subjected to bullying in which her head was shaved by the culprits.
The crisis we are facing regarding forced conversion is highlighted by this story. The good fruits are the innocent girls born with the fate of being a minority in Pakistan. The poisonous weeds are the extremists living in our society.
A report by the Centre for Social Justice cited 162 allegations of forced conversion between 2013 and 2019. This figure merely covers reported cases; there are so many other cases that barely receive the limelight of sympathy and mercy.
Last year one case that actually received media attention was that of Maria Shahbaz, a 14-year-old Christian girl who was abducted and raped. To eradicate the stains of sexual abuse, the girl was forcefully converted and with the knot of marriage the whole dilemma of sexual abuse and abduction was erased.

The recent arrest of a Vatican-approved bishop, priests and seminarians in north-central China came as a shocking development, if not sur-prising, as religious persecution in the communist country has continued to intensify under the watch of President Xi Jinping.
Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu of Xinxiang in Henan province was arrested by police on May 21, a day after police detained his seven priests and an unspecified number of seminarians. They are accused of violating new regulations on religious affairs.
The prelate and the priests drew the ire of authorities by using an abandoned factory as a seminary for religious formation of future priests.
They are charged with breaching a new set of rules for religious clergy implemented this month. It requires all clergy to register with the state in order to serve Catholics while asking Catholics to elect their bishops democratically.
The rules also make it illegal to perform religious activities including worship in places not registered or controlled by the state.
The arrests sparked condemnation from Christian and rights groups.

Four Indian women, who joined as Islamic State fighters and now lodged in an Afghanistan prison, seem to face a bleak future.
The women, all from Kerala, had accompanied their husbands to join the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP).

Several food rights activists in India have applauded a Vatican official’s call to rebuild the world’s food systems to make it more resilient, inclusive and sustainable.
“We have the potential to embark on this journey together, taking this unique Covid crisis as a unique opportunity,” asserted Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
The Ghanian cardinal spoke at the second of a three-part webinar the Vatican organized by the Vatican on May 26 ahead of a high level UN Food Systems Pre-Summit gathering in Rome in July.
The webinar held under the title, “Food Justice: Jobs, innovation, and finance at the service of food justice.”
“Thanks to Cardinal Turkson for re-iterating Jesus’s vision for an equalitarian society,” says Jesuit Father Irudhaya Jothi, a food rights activist in India’s West Bengal state.
Biraj Patnaik, the former principal advisor to the Supreme Court in the right to food case, welcomed the cardinal asserting the right to food as an inalienable right.
“Indeed, Cardinal Turkson is very interested in these issues and is the points person of the Pope on the right to food,” Patnaik told Matters India.
According to him, the UN is running a major food systems summit and the Vatican does comment on the right to food on such occasions.
“The UN food systems summit is at an opportune moment as the world needs a fundamental reset post-pandemic. Covid 19 has shown us that the world cannot sustain itself at the current levels of inequality,” he added.
Cardinal Turkson had stressed the urgent need to re-imagine and re-build food systems, so they “may become more resilient, inclusive and sustainable.” This is not an “impossible enterprise,” he added.
According to him, “the lack of food is inextricably linked with other social struggles, aggravated by the pandemic.”

A weekly program on Hindu-Christian dialogue started by the Bengaluru-based Ecumenical Christian Centre (ECC) has been drawing scores people from across India.
The 25-episode lecture series is titled “Hindu Christian Dialogue for Fellowship: Sages and Saints for Self-Realization and Social Transformation.”
It is meant to understand the saints and sages who laboured for social transfor-mation and advancement of the downtrodden, says ECC director Father Mathew Chandrankunnel. It also aims to help people appreciate the common elements in Hinduism and Christianity and the great masters in both traditions who worked for harmony, peace and progress, the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate priest explained.
Other organizers are the Ramakrishna Mission, Office of the Dialogue of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India and Focolare Movement.
The program that began on May 7 will be conducted 6 pm to 7:30 pm on Thursdays. Almost 100 people have attend-ed the program so far. Around 60 of them are registered members as the program is a certificate course on interfaith dialogue.

Global Sisters Report invited its sister columnists in India to share their experiences of how the terrible outbreak of COVID-19 has affected their country in the last few months. Six sisters wrote special columns, compiled below, describing their experiences and what it is like on the ground as health workers, as tribal citizens, as compassionate caregivers and as victims of the virus themselves.
Almost all calls and messages shock us with news of death, calls of requests and help, with crying and sobbing. We are tired of responding, “Rest in peace,” and exhorting friends to stay home, stay safe, take care, prayers assured! Everywhere, there is breathlessness, helplessness, mourning, sinking hopes and prevailing despair.
People are being treated by the roadsides, in parks and makeshift hospitals with saline bottles hanging on the trunks and branches of trees. The scarcity of medical facilities is scandalous to us; in this tug of war between life and death, death seems to be stronger, swallowing lives. I was stunned to see on the TV news a woman giving oxygen to her infected husband, mouth to mouth. Ultimately, he died in a car outside the hospital from lack of a ventilator and hospital bed.
. Five priests died in the state of Gujarat in 15 hours. Two sisters of the same congregation, both on the leadership team, died of COVID-19 in two days in the same hospital. I was broken because I had worked with both of them.
One of our kitchen staff lost her husband and daughter on the same day. A parishioner died the day before her daughter. A wife died, but the husband in the ICU does not know it.
As a tribal woman religious, I am saddened that we have lost many young tribal scholars and intellectuals in the pandemic, mainly from Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Odisha.
I managed to talk to the members of a family affected by COVID-19 in my village in Jharkhand. They said: “Sister, we can’t afford to go to hospital as we are poor. We will die of this virus at our home itself. For us, no medicines are available at an affordable price. We don’t have single rooms in our homes to be quarantined.”
It is in this context that I, as a Catholic and religious, am pondering how to revive hope in people who trust in the divine power and existence of God and how to help people to deepen their faith in the Lord.
How and where to get courage and strength? Sometimes, like Jesus’ apostles, I ask: “Where are you, Lord? Why have you forsaken the world and me? Lord, come to save our world and family. ‘Lord, save us. We are perishing’ “ (Matthew 8:25).
But maybe those are the wrong questions. Now, I am asking, “Lord, how are you present to us amid this pandemic reality?” In my spiritual attempt to protect my world from COVID-19, I find that Psalm 91 is helpful in giving me faith.
I have seen people helping enemies; oxygen cylinders being distributed thanks to generous help from several different countries; those who are well praying for the sick. Many families who did not pray are now on their knees, praying with great trust and faith; many are finding solace in online Masses, the divine mercy rosary, and adoration. I composed a Hindi hymn for the intercession of Mother Mary Bernadette, our founder, who served during the cholera epidemic of 1895.
Let us “be positive but test negative.”