Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ former finance minister, will soon return to the Vatican during an extraordinary economic scandal for the first time since he was cleared of child abuse allegations in Australia five months ago, a church agency said on September 28.
Pell will fly back to Rome on Sept. 29, CathNews, an information agency of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference said, citing “sources close to” Pell.
Pell’s return follows Francis firing one of the cardinal’s most powerful opponents, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, over a financial scandal.
Pell was regarded as the third highest-ranking Vatican official and was attempting to wrestle the Holy See’s opaque finances into order when he returned to his native Australia in 2017 to clear himself of decades-old allegations of child sex abuse. Becciu said he was fired after Francis told him that documents from the Italian financial police alleged the 72-year-old cardinal had embezzled 100,000 euros ($116,200). Becciu, the former No. 2 in the Vatican’s secretariat of state, denied wrongdoing.

Chinese authorities have demolished thousands of mosques in Xinjiang, an Australian think tank said on September 25, in the latest report of widespread human rights abuses in the restive region. Rights groups say more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking people have been incarcerated in camps across the north-western territory, with residents pressured to give up traditional and religious activities.
Around 16,000 mosques had been destroyed or damaged, according to an Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) report based on satellite imagery documenting hundreds of sacred sites and statistical modeling.
By contrast, none of the Christian Churches and Buddhist Temples in Xinjiang that were studied by the think tank had been damaged or destroyed.

Christianity won’t be driven from Nigeria by Boko Haram and Fulani militants, says one human rights advocate. Christians make up about half the population of Nigeria, but have faced harsh persecution in recent years on multiple fronts, primarily from Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram and Muslim Fulani herdsman, who have attacked Christian villages in search for grazing territory for their cattle. However, Johnson said the resilience of Nigeria’s Christian community is stronger than terrorism. “If Boko Haram is allowed to create a caliphate, they would kill all Christians whom they found,” Johnson told Crux. “This does not indicate, however, an end to Christianity in Nigeria. The Gospel spreads quicker in areas of high persecution than anywhere else.” he said.

The Jesuit-run Central American University in El Salvador welcomed the verdict of a Spanish court, which convicted a former Salvadoran colonel for the murder of five Jesuit priests in 1989. The verdict was “an extraordinary service to the truth” from a conflict in which many atrocities have gone unpunished, the university statement said. It expressed some sadness, however, that justice had not occurred in El Salvador, where the slayings occurred during the country’s civil war.

French President Emmanuel Macron criticised on September 4 what he called “Islamic separatism” in his country and those who seek French citizen-ship without accepting France’s “right to commit blasphemy.”
Mr Macron defended satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that helped inspire two French-born Islamic extremists to mount a deadly January 2015 attack on the newspaper’s newsroom.
The weekly republished the images as the trial began of 14 people over the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher super-market.
Speaking at a ceremony celebrating France’s democratic history and naturalising new citizens, the French President said, “You don’t choose one part of France. You choose France… The Republic will never allow any separatist adventure.”
Freedom in France, Mr Macron said, includes “the freedom to believe or not to believe. But this is inseparable from the freedom of expression up to the right to blasphemy.”

A statement from the Archdiocese of Westminster confirmed that the baptism of Wilfred Johnson took place.
“We can confirm that Wilfred Johnson was baptised in West-minster Cathedral on September 12, 2020, in a private ceremony, attended by both parents and a small number of guests, in keeping with current (Covid-19) guidelines,” said the diocese.
The government had revealed the baptism of the four-month-old boy to disprove claims in the media that the Prime Minister had taken time off work to make a social trip in Italy as the UK began to wrestle with a second wave of the coronavirus.
Johnson dismissed the allegations that he had been seen in Perugia that weekend as “completely untrue” with his spokesman inviting the media to “confirm with the priest” that he had attended his son’s baptism that day.
The priest who baptised Wilfred was Father Daniel Humphreys, the acting administrator of the cathedral, and he said performed the ceremony in the Lady Chapel. The identity of the godparents has not been revealed.

Italy’s top Muslim leader, whose organization supports Pope Francis’ pact with Islam, is causing acute embarrassment to Catholic apologists of interfaith dialogue after he insulted Jews and Christians as heretics.
Yassine Baradai, national secretary of the Union of Islamic Communities of Italy (UCOII) – the largest umbrella organization of the Islamic communities in Italy – sparked outrage after trashing Judaism and Christianity as “heresy” and a “manipulation of the original message of the prophets.”
“Indeed, both these creeds are heresy according to Islam,” and the Koran, Baradai wrote in an August 29 Facebook post-summarizing a sermon he’d delivered to mark the festival of Ashura.
“If it were otherwise, we as Muslims would be required to follow Judaism or Christianity, but Islam corrects the crippling made in the residual scriptures of the Torah and the gospel,” Baradai remarked.
“Salvation was offered to the Israelite people and not the Jewish people, who are of recent nascency” since “the children of Israel weren’t Jews,” Baradai argued.
Baradai’s statement is a slap in the face of Vatican II’s pronouncements that “Islam is among the three Abrahamic religions” and that “Muslims worship with us a single, merciful God.”

The Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) has appointed a Catholic nun to set up a national Catholic television station. Sister Agnes Lucy Lando, the director of Research and Postgraduate Studies at Kenya’s Daystar University, is the coordinator and lead consultant to assist the conference to launch Ukweli Television Kenya. The Communications Authority of Kenya has recently issued a commercial free-to-air broadcast license to the new television station, whose motto is bringing ‘Christ to the people and people to Christ.”

Missiologists have long spoken of the explosive growth of the church in Iran.
Now they have data to back up their claims—from secular research.
According to a new survey of 50,000 Iranians—90 percent residing in Iran—by GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based research group, 1.5 percent identified as Christians.
Extrapolating over Iran’s population of approximately 50 million literate adults (the sample surveyed) yields at least 750,000 believers. According to GAMAAN, the number of Christians in Iran is “without doubt in the order of magnitude of several hundreds of thousands and growing beyond a million.”
The traditional Armenian and Assyrian Christians in Iran number 117,700, according to the latest government statistics.
Christian experts surveyed by CT expressed little surprise. But it may make a significant difference for the Iranian Church.
“With the lack of proper data, most international advocacy groups expressed a degree of doubt on how widespread the conversion phenomenon is in Iran,” said Mansour Borji, research and advocacy director for Article 18, a UK-based organization dedicated to the protection and promotion of religious freedom in Iran.
“It is pleasing to see—for the first time—a secular organization adding its weight to these claims.”
The research, which asked 23 questions about an individual’s “attitude toward religion” and demographics, was run by professors associated with the respected Dutch universities of Tilburg and Utrecht. “The Iranian authorities lost oversight of it,” said Nicolai. “There was nothing they could do to stop the spread of the gospel.”

A former colonel of the Salvadoran military, Inocente Orlando Montano Morales, has been convicted in a Spanish court for is participation in the murder of five Jesuit priests in 1989. Montano has been sentenced to more than 133 years in prison. The former colonel was El Salvador’s vice-minister for public security during the civil war that divided El Salvador in the 1980s. He was convicted on September 11 of planning and ordering the killing of five Jesuit priests, all of whom were Spanish, at the Central American University in San Salvador.
A Salvadoran Jesuit priest, their housekeeper, and her daughter were also killed, but the former colonel was convicted in Spain only of the killings of the five Spanish Jesuits.
Montano maintained his innocence, though witnesses testified that he believed the Jesuits were collaborators of the Marxist guerilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which El Salvador’s military junta fought in a bloody civil war that spanned more than a decade.
The Jesuits in El Salvador were active proponents of peace talks and a negotiation between the government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. One of the priests killed, Father Ignacio Ellecuria SJ, was an outspoken critic of El Salvador’s government, according to Reuters. The killings took place on Nov. 16, 1989, during a battle being waged across the city of San Salvador. Ellecuria served as rector of the Central American University, which was occupied by an elite battalion of the Salvadoran army.
A unit of the Salvadoran Army dragged from their beds the six Jesuits and shot them.