The social media giant had a proposition, Sam Collier, the pastor, recalled in an interview: to use the church as a case study to explore how churches can “go further farther on Facebook.”
For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong’s grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was “partnering with Facebook” and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.
Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.
“They are teaching us, we are teaching them,” he said. “Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook.”
The company’s effort to court faith groups comes as it is trying to repair its image among Americans who have lost confidence in the platform, especially on issues of privacy. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the country’s growing disinformation crisis and breakdown of societal trust, especially around politics, and regulators have grown concerned about its outsize power. Over the past week, President Biden has criticized the company for its role in the spread of false information about Covid-19 vaccines.
“I just want people to know that Facebook is a place where, when they do feel discouraged or depressed or isolated, that they could go to Facebook and they could immediately connect with a group of people that care about them,” Nona Jones, the company’s director for global faith partnerships and a nondenominational minister, said in an interview.
Last month, Facebook executives pitched their efforts to religious groups at a virtual faith summit. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, shared an online resource hub with tools to build congregations on the platform.
“Faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection,” Ms. Sandberg said.
“Our hope is that one day people will host religious services in virtual reality spaces as well, or use augmented reality as an educational tool to teach their children the story of their faith,” she said.

The Vatican released the names of members of two commissions charged with assisting the leaders of the Synod of Bishops’ general secretariat in reviewing documents, drafting resources and developing best practices.
According to the synod we-bsite, the theological commission and the methodology commission will include religious and lay experts from around the world.
The theme chosen by the pope for the next synod is: “For a synodal church: communion, participation and mission.”
Cardinal Mario Grech, se-cretary-general of the Synod of Bishops, told Vatican News in May that, although originally scheduled for 2022, the synod will take place in October 2023 to allow for broader consultation at the diocesan, national and regional level.
In revisions to the synod process announced in May, Pope Francis has asked that it begin with consultations with laypeople on the diocesan level before the discussion and discernment moved to a national level and then the 2023 synod assembly itself.

For Father Stephen Hilgen-dorf, it has been a long journey from his role as a priest in the Anglican tradition.
It included a desire to be in full communion with the Catholic Church that was so strong he was willing to give up ministry altogether. But God had other plans for him. He and his family were received into Catholic Church, then some years later he was accepted to become a Catholic priest.
After studying, working and ministering in the Twin Cities the past six years, he was ordain-ed a priest for the Houston-based Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter June 29. His next assignment will be in Omaha, Nebraska. The ordinariate is equivalent to a diocese for Roman Catholics who were nurtured in the Angli-can tradition. Created by the Vatican Jan. 1, 2012, it serves Catholic parishes and communities across the United States and Canada.
“I had to come to grips with the thought, ‘I may never be a priest again,’” Hilgendorf, 33, said after his ordination. “After becoming Catholic, I found it very difficult going to Mass. I was not sure who I was any-more.”

As Iraqis sort through the rubble of the latest terrorist attack Tuesday, an attack on a busy market in downtown Baghdad that left at least 30 people dead, one Catholic priest in Iraq says it’s important not just to focus on the horror of life in the country but also the hope. As it happens, the bombing came four days after 70 children received their first communion in the city of Telskuf in the Nineveh Plains, a region in northern Iraq that borders with the Kurdistan region, and which was invaded by IS in 2014.

The register of damaged and ruined church buildings of Russia has almost 4 thousand objects already, the website of the Moscow Patriarchate reported on July 1. At the same time, it was noted that, according to the total estimates of the diocesan tree keepers, about a thousand churches have a high risk of collapse in the next decade.
Two years ago, the Supreme Church Council approved the concept of creating an electronic and digital archive for all ruined churches in a short time.

Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who has been caught up in a real estate scandal, speaks to the media a day after he resigned, Rome, Italy, September 25 2020.
A Vatican judge on Saturday ordered 10 people, including an Italian cardinal, to stand trial for alleged financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office.
Those indicted include Cardinal Angelo Becciu as well as the former heads of the Vatican’s financial intelligence unit and two Italian brokers involved in the Vatican’s purchase of a building in a luxury area of London.
Becciu, who Pope Francis fired last year and who has always maintained his innocence during a two-year investigation, became the highest ranking Vatican based Church official to be indicted for alleged financial crimes.
As per Church law, the pope personally approved the judge’s decision to investigate and indict Becciu. The charges against him include embezzlement and abuse of office. An Italian woman who worked for Becciu was charged with embezzlement.
Italian brokers Gianluigi Torzi and Raffaele Mincione were indicted on charges of embezzlement, fraud and money laund-ering. Torzi, for whom Italian magistrates issued an arrest warrant in April, was also charged with extortion.
Both have denied wrongdoing. Four companies associated with individual defendants, two in Switzerland, one in the United States and one in Slovenia, were also indicted. The trial is due to start on July 27 in the Vatican, a statement said.

Reports are emerging of religious leaders being among those detained amid unprecedented nationwide protests in Cuba…
Protests erupted across the country on 11 July in response to Cuba’s ongoing and severe economic crisis and a record surge in corona-virus cases, before expanding to criticisms of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP)’s decades-long hold on power, crackdown on human rights and pro-democracy movements, and management of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In response, the government appears to have disconnected the internet in most of the island’s major cities, but reports of violations targeting protesters and religious leaders have continued to emerge. Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel also made public calls for ‘revolutionaries’ to take to the streets to defend the Revolution by fighting protestors.

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning the ongoing repression the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a formation that unites Kurdish forces and the left by the Turkish government. The signatories of the document stress that this retreat “reveals the dire human rights situation in Turkey and the continued erosion of democracy and the rule of law.”
The text was approved with 603 votes in favour and only two against. Promoted by Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens and Leftists, it condemns “the repression of opposition political parties, particularly the HDP, and urged the government to ensure that all parties can freely and fully exercise their legitimate activities in accordance with the basic principles of a pluralist and democratic system.”
The European politicians express “deep concern” about “this serious backsliding on the freedom of the opposition parties to function” in Turkey.

In a June 20 inter-view with Croatian Catholic weekly Glas Koncila, the Christian politician, who has been disparaged by Pope Francis as a populist and nationalist, dismissed reports of Francis’ refusal to meet him on the Hungary papal visit as “false news.”
Attributing media reports first published by faithful Catholic Vaticanist Edward Pentin to “anti-Church and anti-Christian circles,” the prime minister went on to claim that a lack of clarity regarding protocol was responsible for the breakdown in diplomacy.
Pope Francis is visiting Hungary not as head of state but as head of the Catholic Church attending the Eucharistic Congress, which is not a Hungarian event, Orbán noted.
Nevertheless, Orbán remarked that “what hurts [him] the most,” is that he would “not be able to attend the beatification of Cdl. Stefan Wyszyñski, which takes place on the same day in Poland as the World Eucharistic Congress in Hungary.”
A Vatican expert told Church Militant that “Orbán’s considerable regret at not being able to attend Wyszyñski’s beatification is likely a dig at Francis and his handlers for planning a papal visit to Budapest lasting just a few hours and, at first, even refusing to meet the nation’s leaders.”

In Hong Kong right now, Jimmy Lai is sacrificing all — his fortune and possibly his life — for his God, his fellow man, and for freedom.
Lai is a billiona-ire, although he wasn’t always one. Born two years before the Communists defeated the nationalists in China’s civil war, his father fled and his mother was sent to a labor camp when he was a young child. Carrying bags for train passengers and getting by as a street vendor, he first tasted freedom when a man from British Hong Kong gave him a bar of chocolate.
Lai is a British citizen, al-though he wasn’t always one. Having seen a glimpse of prosperity and freedom, he chased it to the then-free British island colony, stowing away aboard a ship when he was just 12 years old and working on the floor of a clothing factory.
Lai is a Catholic, although he wasn’t always one. He met the faith through his wife, a pious woman he accompanied to church, where he heard the homilies of Cardinal Joseph Zen and in 1997 was baptized into the church by the same great man.
Today Lai is in a prison cell in Hong Kong, and the Communist dictatorship has once again seized one of his life’s works, shutting do-wn his newspaper. “I have a soul,” he said in early 2019, and so the truth lives in him.
“No one can say we didn’t fight… Prison life is the pinnacle of my life. I am completely at peace.”