Women in traditional white dresses have carried a centuries-old statue of the Virgin Mary to mark Whit on June 10 in an annual ritual in the eastern German town of Rosenthal. Hundreds of Catholic Sorbs, a Slavic minority, held prayers in rural churches in about a dozen areas before walking to Rosenthal for another service. They then ended their pilgrimage walking with the young women carrying the 1480 wooden statue of Mary through the town to a field for an open-air mass.

The ritual marks Whit Monday, the day after Whitsun or Pentecost, which falls seven weeks after Easter Sunday and is the day the Holy Spirit is said to have descended upon the apostles. The day is a national holiday in Germany and many other countries

After 137 years of ongoing construction, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia received a building permit on June 6.

Construction on the basilica is expected to be completed in 2026.

Architect Antoni Gaudí began his work on Sagrada Familia in 1883, and in 1914 stopped all other projects to work exclusively on the basilica, to which he dedicated himself until his death in 1926.

“It was a historical anomaly that La Sagrada Familia did not have a license,” said Janet Sanz, deputy mayor for Ecology, Urbanism and Mobility, according to NPR.

“They were working on the church in a very irregular way,” she said. “And we were very clear that, like everyone else, La Sagrada Familia should comply with the law.”

A permit had been applied for in 1885, but the city’s council never responded to the application. Three years ago, the authorities discovered that the building did not have the proper paper-work.

Syriac Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Nizar Semaan begins his new mission in Iraq with hope “that Christianity will flourish again” in his homeland.

Semaan chose the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh, Iraq, his birthplace, as the site of his episcopal ordination on June 7.

Still scarred from the Islamic State group and not yet fully restored, the church, Semaan said, is “a symbol of what happened to our cities and villages in 2014 until the liberation (in 2017) from ISIS.”

It’s also the church where the new bishop was ordained a priest in 1991. Located in the Ninevah Plain, Qaraqosh was the largest Christian city in Iraq. Its 50,000 residents – all of them Christians were expelled by Islamic State forces in a single night during the summer of 2014. They were among 120,000 Christians up-rooted from Mosul and the Ninevah Plain that summer.

When Pascal Siakam was in his young teens attending a minor seminary in Cameroon – and mostly playing soccer in his free time – he likely never imagined he’d be playing in the NBA Finals.

Studying for the priest-hood, it turned out, was more of his father’s idea, and not a personal calling. Now-25-year-old forward for the Toronto Raptors, who are playing in their first Finals against the Golden State Warriors.

The 6-foot-9 player, drafted by the Raptors in 2016, also is a possible candidate for the NBA’s Most Improved Player award. He made just one 3-point shot in his first season; he now averages one 3-point shot made per game.

In 2017, ESPN writer Jackie MacMullan went to Cameroon to visit Siakam’s hometown of Douala and St Andrews Seminary in Bafia for a feature story.

She interviewed the semi-nary’s director, Msgr Armel Collins Ndjama, who said through an interpreter that he knew early on that Pascal’s father had a vision “and Pascal was not sharing it.”

“I knew we would probably not be able to train him to be a priest, but I still hoped we could teach him to be a man,” the priest added.

Siakam similarly agreed that he did not think he had a vocation to the priesthood, but he also didn’t want to go against his father. “There isn’t a better man I’ve known in my life,” he told ESPN about his dad, who died before Siakam’s first college game after complications following a car accident.

Pope Francis has met with Brazil’s indigenous chief Raoni, who is on a European tour to raise awareness about the dangers facing the Amazon. The pope’s meeting with one of the great leaders of the Kayapo people living in the Amazonian forest in Brazil, took place at the Vatican on May 27.

“Through this meeting, Pope Francis reaffirms his attention to the Amazonian peoples and environment and his commitment to the preservation of the common home,” the Holy See explained in a statement.

The Vatican also said that the meeting was part of the preparation of the next Synod of Bishops’ special assembly on Amazonia to be held next October in the Vatican.

The working document, which will serve as a basis for the debates of this assembly, is scheduled to be published in June, Cardinal Pedro Barreto of Huancayo (Peru) and member of the pre-synodal council, announced a few days ago.

A conference in Taiwan has been told that China’s communist government is increasingly using so-called ‘sharp power’ to stymie international scrutiny of its poor human rights record, including the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.

At the same time, the Beijing regime has been tightening controls on its own people, warned academics, student leaders and rights’ campaigners.

The term ‘sharp power’ was coined in December 2017 in a report of the United States non-profit National Endowment for Democracy to describe censor-ship and other tactics used to weaken independent institutions.

Wikipedia defines sharp power as the use of manipulative diplomatic policies by one country to influence and under-mine the political system of a target nation.

The May 18-20 conference in Taiwan marking the 30th anniversary of the June 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre was organized by the Hong Kong-based New School for Democracy and the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.

More than 50 scholars, student leaders and witnesses of the Tiananmen Square protest, as well as representatives of overseas support groups and Hong Kong democratic parties, were present as speakers and discussants.

A Chinese charity called Huiling that supports people with mental disabilities paid tribute this month to Jean Vanier, the Canadian Catholic who inspired its creation, after he died in France on May 7 at the age of 90.

Huiling founder Meng Weinuo, a Chinese Catholic, said Vanier had recently been beset by health problems.

“He’d been in and out of hospital several times this year,” she said. “We knew it was just a matter of time before he returned to his heavenly home.”

The charity enjoys support from the Catholic Church. Meng set it up in the southern port city of Guangzhou in 1990 with Father Cagnin Fernando, a member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME).

Huiling gained a reputation as the first NGO to serve mentally disabled people in China during the 1980s. It now has 20 service points nationwide.

Meng said she was inspired by L’Arche, an international private voluntary organization that works for the creation of growth of homes, programs, and support networks for people with intellectual disabilities.

Vanier, a Catholic who was born in Canada but later migrated to France, founded L’Arche in 1964. He was also a co-founder in 1971 of Faith and Light, a similar organization.

Meng got to meet Varnier in France in May 2013 when she and Father Fernando visited a L’Arche community there.

“Huiling has always admired L’Arche. We really want to be a sister organization with you,” she recalled telling the elderly Canadian.

Varnier welcomed the move but said he had stepped down from running the organization. He referred her to the head of L’Arche International.

Six months later, the two agencies signed a partnership deal. L’Arche agreed to provide training and spiritual support to Huiling.

A Kenyan activist gestures next to a banner with a collaged image of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto during a march against corruption in Nairobi on April 30.

Kenya’s bishops have launched a campaign to slay “the dragon of corruption” in the East African nation.

Archbishop Philip Anyolo, chairman of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, said corruption has reached alarming levels and the only way to fight it is by starting from the grass roots.

“We have allowed the dragon of corruption to pull us down to the point where we have accepted it to be our way of life,” he said in a statement on behalf of the organization.

“We are also caught up in perennial, endless political bickering, maneuvers and utterings that slow our country in moving forward in a fresh direction that will bring meaningful development and national integration.

“We all know that corruption is a grave sin and therefore call upon our faithful and people of goodwill to externally commit freely and sincerely, appending their signatures where and when needed, for fighting corruption and corruption practices.”

Archbishop Anyolo said, Kenyan bishops will lead from the front by rejecting all forms of corrupt practices as he urged Kenyans to promote a culture of honesty.

“Kenyans seem to have lost their moral conscience of doing good. Why is it so difficult to resolve not to engage in bribes, either receiving or giving bribes? The war on corruption has to be won by each citizen, indeed each person; you and me,” he added.