Pope Francis on Sept. 8 celebrated a former student of his who is now sometimes called Madagascar’s “living saint” for having changed the lives of thousands of poor people who once lived in garbage dumps.

Thousands of former slum dwellers, many of them children, gave the Pope an ecstatic welcome, leaving him seemingly overwhelmed by the experience, who only hours earlier defended the poor in the homily of a huge open-air Mass..

Francis taught Father Pedro Opeka theology at the Colegio Máximo de San Miguel in Buenos Aires in 1968 while Francis was completing his own studies for the priesthood.

Over the last 30 years, an organization founded by Opeka, whose parents emigrated to Argentina from Slovenia, has built homes for 25,000 people, 100 schools, six clinics and two football stadiums across the island nation. Next year, he plans to build a college for paramedics.

The white-bearded, jovial Opeka, 71, has been called a “living saint” along the lines of Mother Teresa of Calcutta by many in Madagascar because of his work in one of Africa’s poorest countries. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Pope met families living in Akamasoa, one of the first villages built by Opeka on the hills above Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo to re-house people living on the municipal dump in the valley below.

The Synod of Bishops for the Amazon will help the Catholic Church make its presence felt and voice heard in a region that is dangerously approaching “a point of no return,” said the special secretaries of the Synod.

“It is a great and continuing challenge for the Catholic Church to make the original Amazonian peoples feel part of it and contribute to it with the light of Christ and the spiritual richness that shines in their cultures,” Cardinal-designate Michael Czerny and Bishop David Martinez De Aguirre Guinea wrote in an article published on Sept. 12 in La Civilta Cattolica, the Jesuit journal.

Cardinal-designate Czerny, undersecretary of the Migrants and Refugee Section of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Bishop Martinez, apostolic vicar of Puerto Maldonado, Peru, said the Synod will take place at a time when “both human and natural life are suffering serious and perhaps irreversible destruction.”

The Synod, scheduled for October 6-27, will focus on “Amazonia: New paths for the church and for an integral ecology.”

More than 20 years ago, Ann Pollak travelled to Calcutta, hoping to volunteer alongside Mother Teresa. The experience would spark a years-long process that would eventually lead her to adopt a severely handicapped child from one of the care centres run by the Missionaries of Charity.

“It has not been easy, at all, but the blessings have far, far outweighed the sacrifices,” Pollak told CNA. “Oddly, in adopting a blind child, I began seeing the world through my own eyes from a different perspective.”

Nearly 18 years ago, Pollak adopted a child from one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages. But adoption was not initially her intent.

In 1995, Pollak travelled to India in order to meet Mother Teresa. She spent two weeks doing volunteer work and was impressed with Mother Teresa’s constant smile, and the fact that despite winning a Nobel Prize and being globally famous, the religious sister was very approachable.

Pollak would return to do volunteer work numerous times in the years that followed. In 1997, about a month before Mother Teresa’s death, she was working with handicapped children. She was assigned to feed one little girl, Rekha, who was blind, autistic and mentally delayed.

“She had the sweetest smile on her face,” Pollak recalled of Rekha. “I just fell in love with her.” She also believed that the child had potential to develop and grow, if she was able to get the proper care and attention from a family.

A year later, Pollak returned to India to see if the little girl was still there. She was.

But as time went on, she became frustrated with her inability to find anyone to care for the girl. She began praying every day, asking God for a solution. Although she had not previously considered adoption, she began to feel an inner call to adopt Rekha. “I couldn’t find any other solution,” she reflected.

Christians who focus more on being superficially close to the church rather than care for their fellow brothers and sisters are like tourists who wander around aimlessly, Pope Francis said.

People “who are always passing by but never enter the church” in a fully communal way of sharing and caring engage in a sort of “spiritual tourism that makes them believe they are Christians but instead are only tourists of catacombs,” the Pope said Aug. 21 during his weekly general audience.

“A life based only on profiting and taking advantage of situations to the detriment of others inevitably causes inner death,” he said. “And how many people say they are close to the church, friends of priests and bishops yet only seek their own interests. These are the hypocrisies that destroy the church.” During the audience, Clelia Manfellotti, a 10-year-old girl from Naples diagnosed with autism, walked up the steps to where the Pope was sitting.

The Pope told his security detail to “let her be. God speaks” through children, prompting the crowd to erupt in applause. While greeting the Italian-speaking pilgrims at the end of the audience, Pope Francis reflected on the young girl who is “a victim of an illness and doesn’t know what she is doing.”

“I ask one thing, but everyone should respond in their heart: ‘Did I pray for her; looking at her, did I pray so that the Lord would heal her, would protect her? Did I pray for her parents and for family?’ When we see any person suffering, we must always pray. This situation helps us to ask this question: ‘Did I pray for this person that I have seen, (this person) that is suffering?’” he asked.

Bishops, nuns, priests and residents of the Amazon basin met in Colombia’s capital city in mid-August to prepare for a special Synod of Bishops for the Amazon this fall at the Vatican.

The meeting gave bishops who will be attending the Synod a chance to develop proposals and listen to residents of the Amazon region, before they head to the Vatican in October for the gathering. Similar pre-synod meetings have been held recently in Peru and Brazil.

Pope Francis “wants to give visibility to the people of the Amazon and listen to their concerns, their teachings, their spirituality,” said Bishop Joaquin Pinzon Guiza of Puerto Leguiza-mo-Solano, a vicariate deep in the world’s largest rainforest. “As bishops we don’t just want to take our thoughts to the Synod, but also what lies within our peoples’ hearts.”

The Synod, announced by Pope Francis in October 2017, will focus on how to improve the church’s work in the vast but sparsely populated Amazon biome, which sprawls across nine South American countries and is largely inhabited by indigenous groups. Approximately 110 bishops that lead church juris-dictions in the Amazon will attend as well as representatives of continental episcopal conferences and 32 observers, including indigenous leaders.

Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, is a place of prayer, con-version and pilgrimage for millions of people, but the church must be prudent and not rush to any judgment on the alleged Marian apparitions there, said Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization. Speaking to Catholic News Service at Knock Shrine in County Mayo on August 15, the feast of the Assumption, Arch-bishop Fisichella spoke of attending the first officially approved church festival at Medjugorje in early August.

“I confess the experience was very beautiful, seeing about 70,000 young people praying and living together and listening to catechesis,” he told CNS, describing it as a mini-World Youth Day.

The presence of so many young people there was, he suggested, “one of the fruits” of the pastoral efforts of Medjugorje.

Visionaries claim to have seen than 40,000 Marian apparitions since June 1981, when six teenagers first claimed they first saw an apparition of Our Lady while herding sheep.

As always, when confronted with an apparition, the church “is always prudent,” Archbishop Fisichella said.

In May 2018, Pope Francis named Polish Archbishop Henryk Hoser as apostolic visitor to the shrine, after a papal commission recommended that Medjugorje, which attracts up to 3 million visitors annually, be designated a pontifical shrine with Vatican oversight. A ban on pilgrimages organized by dioceses and parishes was then lifted by papal decree.

Groups representing Christians in northeast Syria are appeal-ing for prayer, fearful that Turkey plans to make good its numerous threats to invade the region with its military forces.

Since November 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch a large military operation east of the Euphrates River to “clear Kurdish terrorists” from the area. Syriac Christians view it as a pretext to enter more of Syria in a bid to change the Northeast’s demographic of Kurds and Christians, just as Turkey did in Afrin, Syria, in March 2018.

The Christians’ appeal was issued by the Syriac National Council of Syria, the Syriac Union Party, and the American Syriac Union. It was made available to Catholic News Service on August 15.

Turkey has “massed its army and allied jihadists along the border. Even though the U. S. and French armies are present in northeast Syria, we know that Turkey will attack and destroy us,” the three Syriac Christian groups said. They are appealing to U. S. leaders to intervene on their behalf to aid the 100,000 Christians in the region who they say are at risk.

They warned that Turkey and its jihadist allies, including fighters from al-Qaida and Islamic State, could carry out “a massacre just as they did in Afrin (northwest Syria) in 2018, when the churches of Afrin were burned and the Christians and Yazidis there were hunted down. In northeast Syria, it would be much worse and destroy many more people.”

On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, a German archbishop has called for a stand against hubris and arrogance of those in political power.

Speaking on the occasion of a Mass in the former Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz on August 14, Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg recalled the witness of the Polish martyr and saint Fr Maximilian Kolbe.

“On the anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, Maximilian Kolbe reminds us to profess that God is the Almighty to whom all must submit for peace and unity in our world today,” Archbishop Schick said.

“No person can put themselves above God, and no nation can put itself above another, the German prelate stressed, adding that the most important contribution of Christians to peace and unity among peoples and nations was “to profess the one and only benevolent God, the Father of all creation.”

God gives equal dignity and rights to all people, peoples and nations, and imposes the same duties of charity on all, Schick said, adding that St Maximilian Kolbe had deeply committed himself to the obligation of charity.

The Polish priest resisted the totalitarian terror of Nazi ideology and was incarcerated in Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1941, he gave his life for a fellow prisoner. He was brutally executed after suffering starvation in a hunger bunker.

The superior general of the Society of Jesus said on August 21 that the devil is a symbol, but not a person.

The devil, “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Fr Arturo Sosa, SJ, said on August 21 in an interview with Italian magazine Tempi.

“Good and evil are in a permanent war in the human conscience and we have ways to point them out. We recognize God as good, fully good. Symbols are part of reality, and the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality,” he added.

Sosa’s remarks came after he participated in a panel discussion at a Catholic gathering in Rimini, Italy, organized by the Commu-nion and Liberation ecclesial movement.

The Catechism of the Catholic teaches that ”Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: ‘The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing. ’”

Angels, the Catechism says, are “spiritual, non-corporeal beings.”

“They are personal and immortal creatures,” it adds, who “have intelligence and will.”

Pope Francis has called for a joint effort by the international community to stop the fires raging in the Amazon rainforest and protect a region he describes as a “vital lung” of the world.

Speaking after praying the Angelus in St Peter’s Square, the 82-year-old Latin American Pope pointed to the global concern for the “vast fires” in the Amazon praying that through a cross-national commitment they “might be contained as soon as possible.”

Leaders of the world’s major democracies are discussing how to contain the wildfires during their G7 gathering in Biarritz, France. Ireland and France have both threatened to block a free trade agreement between the EU and Latin American Countries if Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro does not change his Amazon policy. Experts believe that the populist leader’s removal of rainforest protections, allowing for deforestation, have fuelled the fires.

For his part, the Pope will host a landmark Synod of bishops gathering on the Amazon in Rome from 6-27 October 2019, which will focus on how the Church can help protect region’s environment and indigenous peoples.

The Pope’s Amazon appeal came after one by the Latin American Bishops.