Women of faith celebrated International Women’s day with discussions on women’s future in the Catholic Church and by exploring if women have been written out of scripture.
“We are talking about the survival of the Church,” said Joanna Moorhead, The Tablet’s Arts editor, who has written widely on the subject of women in the Church for publications including The Guardian, The Observer and The Times.
She told more than 200 participants in The Tablet’s webinar, Do Women have a future in the Catholic Church? that the issue was no longer a women’s issue but an issue for everyone. The question is – does the Church have a future without women?
“Of course it doesn’t. The church has no future without us,” she stated. She also noted the implications of younger catholic women falling away as the Church needs a membership to survive.
During The Tablet’s webinar, Zuzanna Flisowska-Caridi of Voices of Faith recounted her experience of the German Church’s synodal path of reform.
The process has brought together lay people, religious and bishops to discuss four major topics: the way power is exercised in the Church; sexual morality; the priesthood; and the role of women in ministries and offices in the Church.
Zuzanna Flisowska-Caridi, who is part of the commission working on women’s issues, described her experience in Germany as “quite extra-ordinary.”
She said: “Obviously, the process has its limits. But for me, it’s been a really wonderful experience in which lay people, theologians, male and, and female, religious sisters, are all sitting together at the one table, and they’re really trying not to have this hierarchical view. Everyone has his or her voice.

“You are truly blessed! The Lord is with you,” Gabriel the Archangel tells Mary, in a greeting traditionally called the Annunciation, which is remembered today, March 25, in many churches that follow a church calendar.
This week Pope Francis has reminded Catholics that Mary is honoured as the mother of Jesus but “not as co-redeemer”.
“Speaking at his general audience on March 24, the Pope said that while Christians had always given Mary beautiful titles, it was important to remember that Christ is the only redeemer,” the Catholic News Agency reported.
“He was addressing a theological debate about whether the Church should issue a dogmatic definition declaring Mary ‘Co-Redemptrix,’ in honour of her role in humanity’s salvation.”
Pope Francis has previously called that idea ”foolishness.”

A senior Churchman in Vienna and member of the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, says he is “not happy with this statement from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith” – the watchdog’s official name – regarding the Church’s power to bless same-sex unions.
The Church has no such power, the CDF said on Monday of last week – and explained why in a detailed letter that secular media outlets and Catholic punditry have frequently either cherry-picked or largely ignored.
Cardinal Schönborn, Abp of Vienna, distinguished blessings given to persons from those given to couples or their unions, saying that the Church – like a mother – can and should bless persons who seek her blessing whenever possible.
“The Church, as is traditionally said, is Mater et Magistra, mother and teacher,” Cardinal Schönborn offered. “She has to teach, but she is a mother first,” he added, “and many people living and feeling same-sex [attraction] are particularly sensitive to this question: ‘Is the Church a mother to us?’ And they remain children of God,” he went on to say. “They, too, want to see the Church as a mother – and that is why this declaration hit many so parti-cularly painfully: because they feel that they are being rejected by the Church.”
The distinction of individual blessings from those given to unions, however, was one the CDF letter explanatory was also at some pains to make.

An Iranian Christian convert couple faces summons for their prison sentences any day. Homayoun Zhaveh, age 62, and his wife Sara Ahmadi, age 42, were sentenced in November 2020 as members of a house church on national security charges.
Homayoun, who also suffers from advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease, was sentenced to two years, while Sara was originally given 11 years. In December 2020, their appeals reduced Sara’s prison sentence to eight years. All other aspects of their sentencing were upheld including bans on foreign travel and membership of social or political groups.
Intelligence agents originally arrested the couple along in June 2019 while they were on vacation with a few friends. Agents questioned everyone, but only Homayoun and Sara were detained. They released Homayoun after one month, while Sara spent 67 days in prison, 33 of those in solitary confinement, and faced intense psychological torture.
On March 14, the couple was notified that the enforcing agents would soon summon them to serve their prison time. With their appeal process completed, the couple waits anxiously and nervously for their summons.

On March 9, Pope Francis appointed Spanish biblical scholar, Sister Nuria Calduch-Benages, as secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. She expressed her surprise and gratitude in this interview with Vatican News.
Sister Nuria has dedicated her life passionately to the study of the Bible. She teaches Old Testament at the Pontifical Gregorian University and is a renowned ex-pert on Sacred Scripture. Hailing from Barcelona, Spain, Sr Nuria is a member of the Congregation of Missionary Daughters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. She has also taken part in the work of the Study Commission on the Diaconate of Women (2016-2019). She has been a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission since 2014. Her new term will last until 2025.
Among other positions, she is a guest professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, an assiduous collaborator of the Catholic Biblical Federation, a prominent member of specialized journals, serving on the scientific committee of the journal History of Women (University of Flo-rence) and collaborating on the series “Tesis y Monografías” pu-blished by Verbo Divino (Estella). In 2008 she participated as an expert in the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops focusing on “The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church.”

Sri Lanka will soon ban the burqa or face veil, a Cabinet Minister said on Saturday, as he announced the Rajapaksa administra-tion’s latest policy decision impacting the minority Muslim community.
Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara said authorities would henceforth use the controversial Prevention of Terrorism (PTA) law — that human rights defenders have termed ‘draconian’— to deal with religious extremism, with wide-ranging powers to detain suspects for up to two years, to ‘deradicalise’ them.
At a media conference, Mr. Weerasekara said: “The burqa is something that directly affects our national security…this [dress] came into Sri Lanka only recently. It is a symbol of their religious extremism.”

Almost one in eight Russians intend to observe Lent this year, and the proportion among Orthodox Christians reaches 17%, according to the findings of a VCIOM poll obtained by Interfax.
Asked whether they had heard about Lent, 51% of respondents said they had heard something, but did not know exactly on which dates it falls this year. Among those who are religious, such respondents accounted for 45%. Sixteen percent said Lent starts after pancake week, and 14%, or one in seven, said March 15. Nearly one-fifth of Orthodox Russians, or 19%, know the correct start date this year. Meanwhile, 22% are undecided as to whether to observe Lent. Among religious Russians, the proportion is 30%, the pollster said.

In a candid 2019 interview published Saturday, Pope Francis reveals that he sees himself “dying as pope,” either in active duty or in retirement, and in Rome, because, he said, “I am not going back to Argentina.”
In the interview, published by Argentina’s paper of record, La Nacion, Pope Francis acknowledges that he does think about death, but says he is not afraid of it “at all.”
In context, the pope’s reference to not going back to Argentina appears to mean he won’t return for the end of his life, as many had speculated. However, given his reluctance to make a homecoming trip since his election in 2013, it could be that Francis meant he’s never going back at all.
The fact that Francis didn’t stop in Argentina in 2013, on his way to or from Brazil for World Youth Day, has led to speculation ever since about why the pontiff doesn’t want to go home, and, according to some opinion polls, a loss of support among his fellow Argentines who see the pope’s reluctance as a political choice.
For the past eight years, Francis has crisscrossed Latin America. Beyond the Guianas, the only nations in South America the first pope from the Global South hasn’t yet visited are Uruguay, Venezuela, and, of course, his own country, the land of Evita, Maradona and Che.

Reading the Bible has had a positive effect on people’s “mental well-being” during the pandemic, according to a Christian Research survey conducted in the United Kingdom. The survey also found that respondents were reading the Bible more and turning to Bible-related videos more during the pandemic.
The survey, carried out on behalf of the Bible Society, posed a number of questions to 1,000 people in the United Kingdom who identified themselves as Christians and who had attended church at least once a month before restrictions aimed at curbing the pandemic. The questions were asked in December, and the results were published online by the Bible Society March 1.
42% of respondents reported that reading the Bible increased a “sense of hope in God during the crisis, rising to nearly half (49%) among 45- to 54-year-olds,” the report by the Bible Society said. “Some 28% said that reading the Bible had increased their confidence in the future,” while 63% said they felt their level of confidence remained the same, rather than dropping, it said.
It said 23% of those surveyed said the Bible “had increased their mental well-being, including 47% of 24- to 34-year-olds,” and 33% of 16- to 24-year-olds reported that reading the Bible had helped them “feel less lonely.” The report said 35% of survey respondents were reading the Bible more during the pandemic with the biggest increase among 25- to 34-year-olds in which “53% were reading the Bible more often.”
“A quarter of those asked, said that they were reading the Bible ‘multiple times a day’ and half said that they were reading the Bible on a daily basis,” the Bible Society said.
It also found that 25% of the 25- to 34-year-olds in the survey said they had begun reading the Bible during the pandemic.
While many continue to turn to print editions of the Bible, 23% reported using “a Bible-reading app, 30% are now listening to the Bible” and 59% of those surveyed said that “they now watched more Bible-related videos or had started watching them.”

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, head of the Vatican’s evangelization congregation, has expressed concern over the “hijacking” of religion by populist leaders who sow division and exploit the anger of those who feel excluded.
Speaking after he delivered the 2021 Trócaire/St Patrick’s College Maynooth annual Lenten lecture March 9 on “Caring for the Human Family and our Common Home,” the Filipino prelate warned, “There is a grow-ing sense in the world today of divisiveness, and unfortunately religion is being used to further division; sometimes even within the same religious affiliation you have divisions.” Referring to the recent rise of populist leaders, Tagle described the phenomenon as “the return of the powerful big-boss-type of people,” some of whom “hijack religion.”
These so-called populist leaders know where the pockets of disgruntled people are, and they present themselves as messiahs, he said. They use religion as a “convenient way” of getting followers, he added.
The president of Caritas Internationalis noted that in the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis devoted several paragraphs to the matter of populist leaders who claim that they are defending the people, when in fact they are defending a certain group.