The debate over female ordination inside the Catholic Church hinges on the role of women in early Christianity. When he addressed the question of women deacons, the Pope said a commission he set up to look at the historical origins of deaconesses, could not agree over whether they had received sacramental ordination or not.

He told a group of leaders of religious sisters last month: “I cannot make a sacramental decree without a theological, historical foundation.”
How much emphasis can be given to art or artefacts from the early church?

Dr Ally Kateusz, a research associate at the Wijngaards Institute and a historian, believes there is plenty of evidence to show women were present at the altars. She was in Rome to present her case at the Pontifical Gregorian University in a lecture and to discuss the findings in her book “Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership,” published this year by Palgrave Macmillan.

In this book, Dr Kateusz examines fifth-century artefacts from Old Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, and the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople which appear to depict women in liturgical roles.

“They show the early Christian liturgy as it was performed at that time,” she told me while she was in Rome. “A gender parallel liturgy – men and women at the altar.”

“The overarching theology for the liturgy would have been ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, because both Jew and Greek were leaders in the ecclesia; there is neither free nor slave, because both were leaders in the ecclesia; and there is neither male nor female, and both were leaders in the ecclesia’,” she says.

A much-watched migrant vessel finally docked at an Italian island on June 29 , following two weeks at sea. The captain of the “Sea Watch 3” divided public opinion in Europe when she defied Italy’s populist leader by bringing 40 immigrants to shore, but the Catholic Church is standing firmly by her side.

“I think that human life must be preserved in any way. This must be the North Star that guides us, everything else is secondary,” said Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, in a June 29 press conference.

The Sea Watch 3 NGO migrant vessel spent over two weeks in the Mediterranean Sea carrying more than 40 immigrants and 20 staff members, before German Captain Carola Rackete decided the ship couldn’t wait any longer and docked at Lampedusa, an island off the coast of Sicily, in the early hours of June 29.

The leader of Italy’s ruling right-wing populist party, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, has ordered all Italian ports to close their doors to vessels carrying immigrants in an effort he says to reduce migration flows into the peninsula and to combat human trafficking.

On June 26, Salvini said the Sea Watch’s attempt to approach the Italian coast was a “hostile act” and vowed to compel other European countries to take in the immigrants. While the vessel flies the Dutch flag, it’s run by a German NGO.

“I had to dock. I feared that some migrants might commit suicide,” said Rackete in a June 30 video interview with local daily Il Corriere Della Sera, adding that some passengers had tried to cause themselves harm.

“I was afraid. We were taking turns for days, even at night, out of fear that someone might throw themselves into the sea. For those who don’t know how to swim, it means suicide. I feared the worst,” she said.

After ramming patrol boats and docking, Rackete was arrested by Italian police  and she faces an investigation for favoring illegal immigration. She also risks a fine and the impounding of the vessel, but she said she will own up to the legal consequences of her “act of disobedience and not violence.”

More than one-fifth of all church buildings in the Nether-lands have now been converted into libraries, apartments, offices or other functions in line with the growing secularisation in the country, according to an inquiry by the Protestant daily ‘Trouw.’

Of the 6,900 Dutch church buildings, one-fifth of those built before 1800 –which makes them national monuments – have been secularised. Of those built since then, almost one-quarter have been given over to other uses.

Catholic Churches are less likely to be transformed than Protestant ones because of the different meanings the buildings have for the two communities, Trouw said.

“For Roman Catholics the church is sacred, for Protestants the church is useful. As a result, Roman Catholics are more reluctant to give their churches a different function,” it wrote.

That meant only about 15% of Catholic Churches have been desacralised compared to the one-quarter of Protestant Churches that are now serving other functions.

Defeat of California’s attempt to break seal of confession a victory for religious liberty.

Kathleen Domingo is Senior Director for the Office of Life, Justice and Peace and Director of Government Relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. She helped to organize the opposition to a California bill that would have required priests to break the sacramental seal of confession in certain cases.

“SB 360, authored by Senator Jerry Hill, sought to strengthen reporting requirements for child abuse, a goal we share. However, to achieve that goal, it removed the privacy protection for the sacrament of confession in instances of child abuse. Even after the bill was amended, priests and lay people, like me, who work at the same location as priests, would be denied the privacy protection in the sacrament” said  Kathleen Domingo

“I want to practice my religion the way that I want to, and I want you to be able to do the same.”

After months of legislative meetings and grassroots organizing of Catholics throughout California, we prepared a show of force for the Assembly Public Safety Committee hearing, that would have been held on July 9. We delivered 140,000 signed letters to Assembly members and sent close to 17,000 emails from parishioners in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles alone.”

Pope Francis’ plan for the reform of the Roman Curia will change the names of several offices and merge a few of them, but the biggest change it hopes to spark is one of attitude.

The last major reorganization of the Curia came with St John Paul II’s apostolic constitution, “Pastor Bonus” (The Good Shepherd) in 1988, which — in its very first sentence — spoke of Jesus entrusting the apostles with “the mission of making disciples in all nations and of preaching the Gospel to every creature.”

To facilitate that mission in the modern world, St John Paul had said, the church needs a structure to promote “communion,” which “glues the whole church together.”

Pope Francis’ successor document to “Pastor Bonus” is tentatively called “Praedicate Evangelium” (Preach the Gospel), and drafts of it were sent to bishops and a variety of experts for comment in the spring.

Of course, promoting the communion of the church and preaching the Gospel are essential tasks for the Popes. For Catholics they are inextricably bound together, and one makes little sense without the other. But when one is emphasized more than the other, priorities change. The energy of the Curia can be directed to promoting unity, offering direction and gathering suggestions and ideas, a some what inward gaze that could increase the perceived authority of curial officials. The risk is a tendency toward uniformity and thinking that the closer one is to the centre, the more authority he has.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the third most senior active cardinal in the worldwide Church, has called on bishops and other Catholic officials to better engage in listening to victims of clergy sex abuse.

At a lecture last month in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where he has been archbishop since 1995, Schönborn said listening to victims was essential to breaking the “spiral of silence” that has allowed such abuse to continue for so long.

“The victims have to overcome an enormously high threshold even to begin talking,” the 74-year-old cardinal said at a conference on “Sex & Crime” at the Religiosity in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Institute at Vienna University.

He shared his own experience of what he described as the Austrian Church’s “25-year-long painful learning process” of clerical sexual abuse.

Schönborn, a Dominican theologian who became an auxiliary bishop of Vienna Archdiocese in 1991, recalled how it was not until he had actually met with and listened to victims that he was able to overcome his initial defensive reflexes, correct his wrong assumptions and completely change his awareness of clerical sexual abuse. But he said it was extremely difficult to get victims to talk about the abuse they had experienced. The cardinal said a number of victims had told him, “if only I hadn’t begun (talking about the abuse),” telling him they believed suppressing the memory of the painful trauma might spare them even greater suffering.

Millions of Catholics live their faith through their association with lay movements and Catholic groups, but some also have lost their faith when they were sexually abused in those groups and felt they had nowhere to turn. While much of the Church’s recent focus has been on clerical sexual abuse and the accountability of diocesan bishops, the Vatican is making child protection a priority for new movements and lay associations, too.

The Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life brought together close to 100 representatives of Catholic associations and movements for a meeting on June 13 on abuse prevention and procedures for reporting and handling allegations.

Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, prefect of the Vatican office, told the representatives that by the end of December every movement and association in the Church must turn in formal guidelines and protocols for reporting and preventing cases of abuse.

Catholic movements and associations for laypeople, which are given official recognition through the cardinal’s office, were told in May 2018 to draft abuse guidelines. Too many of the groups either did not respond or submitted inadequate protocols, he said.

Farrell said some Catholics in some parts of the world think holding another meeting about the abuse crisis shows that the scandal has become “a fixation,” “an unhealthy obsession” or “a pesky exaggeration.”

A new study says 45% of child deaths in Africa is due to insufficient food, and officials from Caritas fear the situation is not getting better.

The report from the African Child Policy Forum says child hunger “is the most extreme form of child deprivation.”

“Hunger kills, often silently and slowly. It affects and damages children’s health, hinders their capacity to learn, and reduces their ability to earn as much as their better-off peers,” it continues. The study says nearly 60 million children in Africa do not have enough food despite the continent’s economic growth in recent years.

“It is completely unacceptable that children are still going hungry in Africa in the 21st century. The statistics are truly alarming. Child hunger is driven by extreme poverty, uneven and unequal economic growth, gender inequality and a broken food system. Although Africa now produces more food than ever, it hasn’t resulted in better diets,” he said.

One of Germany’s most recently named bishops has raised eyebrows by calling for a “new theology” as an urgent response to revelations of the clerical abuse of power. “We still haven’t fully realized that the crisis of confidence is charging into the Church’s timberwork with unmitigated force,” warned Bishop Heiner Wilmer SCI in a recent interview in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Although the 58-year-old has headed the Diocese of Hildesheim in Northern Germany only since last September, this is not the first time he has made head-lines with his outspoken views.

Wilmer, who was superior general of the worldwide missionary and teaching order known as the “Dehonians” (Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart) before becoming bishop, drew criticism just three months into his new job when he told the Kölner Stadt Anzeiger that abuse of power was in the Church’s DNA.

Thousands of sick people across Eritrea are being deprived of vital medical care after the government seized three hospitals, two health centres, and 16 clinics.

Government soldiers forced patients from their beds and out of the clinics and seized religious houses as they confiscated the 21 health institutes run by the Catholic Church, serving at least 170,000 people every year.

Sources close to the Catholic Church told Aid to the Church in Need that – unless the services were quickly resumed – people could die, with some walking up to 16 miles to access some of the clinics.

With the last of the week-long confiscations taking place on Tuesday (18th June), Eritrea’s four bishops condemned the action in a letter to Eritrea minister of health Amna Nurhusein.

The letter vows to refuse to cooperate with the confiscation program – which in a stroke has closed down all the Catholic Church’s health service premises, some of them dating back more than 70 years.

Calling the move “deeply unjust,” the letter states: “To deprive the church of these… institutions is to undermine its very existence, and to expose its workers, men, and women religious and lay people to persecution…