The Hungarian government and researchers have a joint responsibility to warn the global community of the ongoing persecution of Christians, “the largest and least talked-of humanitarian crisis today,” a government official told a conference in Budapest.

Tristan Azbej, state secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office for persecuted Christians, spoke at a conference organised by the state secretariat, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Budapest’s National Public Service University (NKE).

Christianity is said to be the most persecuted religion in the world, with 215 million people suffering discrimination or genocide-like persecution for their religion worldwide, he said. Some 4,150 Christians have been murdered in 2018, he said.

Azbej noted that the government’s Hungary Helps programme, aiming to help persecuted Christians in their homelands, was launched on the basis of data provided by the university.

British-born John Bradburne, who died in Zimbabwe 40 years ago, could be on his way to be-coming the country’s first canonized saint.

Bradburne is a revered figure among the Catholic community in the landlocked southern African country of Zimbabwe. According to reports, Bradburne was shot in the back after he was abducted from his hut in Mutemwa in the north-east of Zimbabwe. Born in 1921 to Anglican parents in Cumbria, England, Bradburne converted to Catholicism in 1947 while living with Benedictine monks, after he had a religious experience during World War II.

He lived after his conversion as a pilgrim, shuttling between England, the Middle East and Italy, living out of one bag. He was a prolific poet. Bradburne joined the Secular Third Order Franciscan in 1956.

He later made contact with Fr John Dove, a Jesuit friend living in Zimbabwe. Bradburne asked whether there was a “cave in Africa” where he could pray. Dove encouraged him to move to Zimbabwe, where he arrived in 1962.

In Zimbabwe, he told a Franciscan priest the three desires of his life: “to serve leprosy patients, to die a martyr, and to be buried in the Franciscan habit.”

In 1969, seven years after his arrival in the country, Bradburne’s desire to care for leprosy-afflicted patients was fulfilled, when he was appointed the lead caretaker at Mutemwa Leprosy Settlement, a center that cared for leprosy patients.

Bradburne spent hours with patients. He rose at 3:00 each morning, and washed patients, bandaged them, ate with them, and talked with them. Some of them he carried to Mass. But he clashed with leaders at the centre over the conditions in which patients lived, and eventually, he was fired.

Seven religious schools in Eritrea, four of them sponsored by the Catholic Church, have been seized by the country’s government this month. Catholic bishops in the country say the move was motivated by “hatred against the faith.”

“If this is not hatred against the faith and against religion what else can it be?” Eritrea’s bishops asked in a Sept. 4 letter addressed to the Minister of Public Education, SemereRe’esom.

The seven schools seized by the government include three run Protestant and Muslim groups, according to Comboni Catholic missionaries serving in the area. The schools have been nationalized, and will reportedly now be run by the country’s education ministry.

“The actions that are being taken against our educational and health institutions are contrary to the rights and to the legitimate freedom of the Church,” the bishops wrote in their September 4th letter.

The bishops also suggested that the government raise to them any objections to the way in which Catholic schools and hospitals are administered in Eritrea.

Before a Synod, bishops must learn what their people want and think and need, not so they can change church teaching, but so they can preach the Gospel more effectively, Pope Francis told the bishops of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Forty-seven bishops from Ukrainian dioceses in Ukraine and 10 other nations, including the United States, Canada and Australia, met the Pope on Sept. 2 during their Synod in Rome.

Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, told Francis that “every bishop and representative of our local communities has made his journey to Rome carrying with him the sufferings and hopes of the people of God entrusted to our pastoral care.”

The bishops, he said, want to be synodal – walking together with their people – “not only during our sessions but also when we return to our communities. Because, in fact, one cannot walk while seated!”

Speaking to the bishops, Francis focused on Shevchuk’s remarks and on how the Eastern Catholic Churches, like the Orthodox Churches, have a longer and uninterrupted history of decisions flowing from bishops’ Synods. “There is a danger,” the Pope said, which is “thinking today that making a synodal journey or having an attitude of ‘synodality’ means investigating opinions – what does this one and that one think – and then having a meeting to make an agreement. No! The Synod is not a parliament!”

While Synod members must discuss matters and offer their opinions, he said, the purpose is not “to come to an agreement like in politics: ‘I’ll give you this, you give me that.’”

Bishops must know what their lay faithful, priests and religious think, the Pope said, but it’s not a survey or a vote on what should change.

Historically a Catholic country, Brazil has been facing a religious transition since the 1990s, when what had been a steady growth of Evangelical Protestantism began to accelerate.

According to some experts, Brazilian Evangelicals could become a majority in the country as soon as 2032. This phenomenon is particularly strong in the Amazon, where some states have the biggest percentage of Evangelicals in the country.

Four of the six Brazilian States with the biggest proportion of Evangelicals are located in the Amazon, in the northern part of the country. In Rondônia, which is at the top of the list, there were 734,000 Catholics in 2010 – when the last data were released by the government – and 528,000 Evangelicals. Ten years before, in 2000, the number of Catholics was 793,000 and there were only 375,000 Evangelicals.

Father Erich Junger, an Anglican exorcist, has joined the chorus of those voicing concern over recent comments by Jesuit Father General Arturo Sosa saying the devil is not a real person, but a symbol.

Speaking to Crux, Junger, a member of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), said that while he is not a spokesman for his church, as a priest and exorcist he was “greatly shocked and disturbed” to see a person of such prominence in the Jesuit order refer to the devil as “a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”

Though not considered part of the Anglican Communion by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the ACNA is in communion with some Anglican provinces in the Global South. It follows the Anglo-Catholic tradition on exorcism, which adheres to more of the practices and rites of the Catholic Church, tending to use the Roman Catholic rite.

Sosa’s comments, Junger said, “are dangerous and inconsistent with the teachings maintained by the Roman Catholic Church as is codified by their own catechism.”

Though the Jesuits themselves did a fair amount of “damage control” after Sosa’s remarks, Junger said the comments were “very startling and unexpected” for many people.

Pope Francis has spoken in unusually frank terms about the theological divide in the U.S. Catholic Church, calling it an “honour” that some conservative Catholic groups in the country continue to criticize his papacy.

In a brief exchange with a journalist aboard his Sept. 4 flight from Rome for the beginning of a three-nation tour of Southern Africa, the Pope was presented with a new book that details years of efforts by conservative U.S. Catholics to influence his decision-making.

Francis told Senèze that he had heard about the book, published in France and titled How America Wanted to Change the Pope, but had yet to read it. Passing the volume to an assistant, the pontiff joked: “It’s a bomb!”

Criticism from conservative U.S. Catholics has been a staple of Francis’ six-year papacy, with right-wing outlets such as EWTN and First Things taking aim at many of his initiatives, such as his effort to fight global climate change and his focus on the merciful nature of God.

Shortly afterward, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni sought to downplay the importance of Francis’ remarks, saying the Pope was speaking in an “informal context” and “wanted to say that he always considers criticism an honor, especially when it comes from authoritative thinkers, in this case from an important nation.”Francis’ Sept. 4-10 voyage is only his second to sub-Saharan Africa. He will first visit Mozambique, and then the island nations of Madagascar and Mauritius.

Pope Francis announced he will create 13 new cardi-nals on Oct. 5, choosing prelates from 13 different nations as a sign of “the missionary vocation of the church that continues to proclaim the merciful love of God to all men and women of the earth.”

The only Canadian named was 73-year-old Jesuit Father Michael Czerny, undersecretary of the Section for Migrants and Refugees at the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. None of the new cardinals is from the United States.

Cardinal-designate Czerny, who Pope Francis had earlier named as a special secretary for the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon, was in Guararema, Brazil, when the announcement was made. He told Catholic News Service in a text message that he had not known he was going to be made a cardinal.

Announcing the names of the new cardinals Sept. 1, the Pope included 10 men who are under the age of 80 and therefore will be eligible to vote in a conclave to elect a new Pope. Three of the future cardinals are already over the age of 80, and the Pope said he chose them because of their service to the church.

One of the over-80 cardinals-designate is 82-year-old Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, a Missionary of Africa born in England, who had served as president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and later as Vatican nuncio to Egypt.

The others, in the order they were named by the Pope, were:

•    Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo of Jakarta, Indonesia, 69. • Archbishop Juan Garcia Rodriguez of Havana, 71. • Archbishop Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa, Congo, 59. • Archbishop Jean-Claude Hollerich of Lu-xembourg, 61.  • Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 72.  • Archbishop Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, Italy, 63.  • Archbishop Cristobal Lopez Romero of Rabat, Morocco, 67.  • Retired Archbishop SigitasTamkevicius of Kaunas, Lithuana, 80.  • Retired Bishop Eugenio dal Corso of Benguela, Angola, 80.