George’s mother is buried at Iqrit in Galilee, near the border with Lebanon. In 1948, the village of Iqrit was declared a military zone by the Israeli state and the inhabitants, all Catholics, were relocated. In 1951, a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court authorized their return. However, the army ignored the decision and completely destroyed the village, with the exception of the church and cemetery. Since 2014, photographer Constance Decorde has regularly visited Iqrit.  She bears witness to the struggle of a whole community to regain the right to live in the village of their ancestors.

In some places, they are deprived of the right to build or renovate their churches. Elsewhere they are not eligible for social benefits, or to go to university. In most countries of the Middle East, Christians are not citizens like the others.

They are often refused access to top administration posts, in the army or politics. The idea is to prevent them from exercising any power whatsoever over Muslims.

In Egypt, that was why the post of Vice President promised to a Copt by former president Mohammed Morsi, who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood, was changed surreptitiously to “assistant for the political transition” in 2012. In Iraq, the situation is becoming worse. Based on medieval Islamic law, judges are now refusing to admit Christians as witnesses in trials. The urgent need to guarantee their survival in countries where their existence is most threatened should not hide the other struggle of Christians living in the Near East: the fight for citizenship.

Hundreds of Muslim refugees have converted to Christianity across Europe in recent years, according to church leaders, but motives vary.

In Austria, the rolls of Catholic churches swelled with Muslim immigrants, leading to new guidelines for baptism to ensure sincere faith. Other churches in Lebanon, Germany, and England also report growing numbers of Muslim refugee converts from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Bangladesh, and Eritrea.

Bishop George Saliba of Beirut, Lebanon, told PRI he has baptized about 100 Syrian refugees since 2011. In another Beirut church, a pastor meets with Syrian refugees to teach them “Christian doctrines” from Scripture. He requested anonymity out of fear of Islamist reprisals but said dozens of Bible study groups for Syrian refugees now meet in Lebanon.

No national statistics exist, but many local churches across Europe attest to the influx of Muslim refugees seeking to become Christians. Still, they remain a small fraction of the millions of Muslims in Europe.

According to The Guardian, European mosques turned away many homeless and impoverished Muslim refugees seeking assistance. They found help and a warm welcome in churches.

Reasons for conversion vary, from “heartfelt faith,” to gratitude to the Christians assisting them, to hope that it could boost their chances for gaining asylum, The Guardian reported. One Muslim in Germany admitted to NPR he might convert in order to avoid deportation back to Afghanistan, where his “life will be in danger.”

But others appear sincere. A 25-year-old Iranian Kurd now called Silas told NPR studying Islam brought disillusionment. Reading the Bible for the first time in a camp on Germany’s border with Poland prompted questions. “By getting baptized we have to say goodbye to our home country because we can never go back. But we accept this. The Muslim god in Iran was angry and strict, but Jesus accepts us as we are,” an Iranian named Medhi told Germany’s Der Spiegel.

A senior Georgian Orthodox priest has been jailed for the attempted murder of the secretary of the Church’s leader of 40 years, Patriarch Ilia II. Archpriest Giorgi Mamaladse received a nine-year sentence from the City Court in Tbilisi for plotting to poison Shorena Tetruashvili, the patriarch’s long-serving assistant, in what prosecutors said was an attempt to “gain more power” in the Georgian Church. The priest, who headed the Church’s property management service, as well as a church-owned medical centre, was arrested last February at the capital’s international airport. He was carrying cyanide and a pistol in his luggage and was preparing to board a flight to Berlin, where the 84-year-old patriarch was receiving medical treatment.

Georgian newspapers said the case relied on evidence from a journalist with intelligence links, who had secretly recorded the 31-year-old priest requesting help in obtaining the poison. The priest’s defence lawyer insisted Giorgi Mamaladse had not received a fair trial and was ready to take his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

The number of Catholics who believe “the law should allow an abortion if a woman decides on her own she does not wish to have a child” rose to 61% in 2016, a large increase from 39% in 2012 and 33% in 1985, according to the 2016 British Social Attitudes survey.

The percentage of Catholics stating pre-marital sex “is not at all wrong” doubled over the same time period from 38% in 1985 to 76% in 2016. The report found an even greater shift in Catholic attitudes towards same sex relationships. While only 9% said these were “not wrong at all” in 1985, by last year 62% of Catholics agreed with this view.

Catholic views on abortion have been highlighted recently by Conservative MP and leading Brexit supporter Jacob-Rees Mogg, who said in an interview on 6th September that, as a devout Catholic, he opposed abortion, even in pregnancies occurring after rape or incest.

The Social Attitudes Survey found that the highest percentage of people who agreed with its pro-abortion statement were those with no religion, at 78% in 2016.

With towns and cities such as Qaraqosh and Bashiqa in Iraq’s Nineveh Plains now liberated from Islamic State (IS) forces and their original inhabitants begin-ning to return, there is confidence among some local Christian leaders that life is slowly beginning to get back to normal.

“I am optimistic, yes, very optimistic,” says Qaraqosh’s Syriac Catholic Archbishop Yohanna Petros Mouche. “When you look around the villages you see that life is back again.”

A drive through Qaraqosh proves his point. A young boy cycles by, carrying a plastic bag full of bread, while Arabic graffiti on the wall of a house in Bashiqa burnt down by retreating IS forces reads: “Tomorrow will be more beautiful.” The return of Nineveh’s Christians is most visible in Qaraqosh. About 1,500 families – more than 20% of the total Christian population before IS came – have now gone back. A local priest, Father George, has helped facilitate the return through a Centre for Support and Encouragement, a project based in Nineveh’s liberated towns to help returnees who fled the IS invasion.

On 15 June 2014, twin attacks by Al-Shabaab on Mpeketoni left 52 people dead. The attackers killed all who could not recite Muslim prayers, before destroy-ing their homes. A group of around 30 heavily armed men in military gear, suspected to be Al-Shabaab militants, killed three men in Lamu West, near Hindi, at about 1.30 am on September 6.

In eastern coastal Kenya, along the Somali border, Lamu has been beset by Islamist attacks for years. This has instilled fear in regions where Christians are the minority. Wednesday’s attackers, armed with AK-47 rifles, surrounded homes in Bobo village and called out the names of the non-Muslim men, according to local sources.

When the men came out, the assailants ordered them to show their ID cards, before beheading them. The three victims were all Christians.

Gerald Wanjohi was one victim; his wife Catherine climbed onto the roof when the attackers broke down their door. “They were speaking in Somali and broken Swahili,” she testified. Al-Shabaab has targeted Kenyan Christians for years, attacking churches, public places and buses.

On 18 August, three Kenyan Christians were hacked to death by Al-Shabaab militants after they refused to recite the Islamic prayer of faith. A fourth Christian – the mentally challenged older brother of one of the three – was also killed.

In July, the radical Islamist group beheaded nine Kenyans – some of whom belonged to a local church – in the Pandaguo area of Lamu West. This practice appears to be a change of strategy for the group, which has used Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), guns and grenades in the past to attack Kenyan Christians.

As World Watch Monitor reported last month, Al-Shabaab has set up bases in Boni, a forest that straddles the Kenyan-Somali border. The group has been using the forest as a cover to attack villages on the Kenyan side, according to security sources.

“All roads do not need to go through Rome!” – Deligne.

Everything is clear for the former president of the Argentine Bishops Conference who has become Pope. Decisions in the Church do not necessarily need to go through Rome.

“Excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach,” he lamented in §32 of Evangelii gaudium, the document that is the program for his pontificate.

For several months, the C9 (the nine cardinals who advise him on the reform of the Curia) have tackled the question of Church decentralization.

During its latest meeting in mid-June, the group studied “the possibility of transferring certain faculties of the Roman dicasteries to local bishops or bishops conferences in a spirit of healthy decentralization.”

The example given then was that of permanent deacons who currently need to ask authorization from Rome to remarry if they are widowed or wish to be ordained as priests if they are widowers or celibate.

Such authorizations could eventually be given by bishops conferences and no longer by the Congregation for the Clergy.

But according to Greg Burke, director of the Holy See Press Office, this is just one of many examples of decentralization currently being considered by the C9.

“In many dicasteries, there are things of this nature that depend on Rome but which need not necessarily do so,” he explained.

The Pope’s recently published “motu proprio” on liturgical translations, Magnum principium, is typical of this desire.

As a result of John Paul II’s Liturgiam authenticam the work of liturgical translation became blocked, with the Congregation for Divine Worship responsible for verifying that the original Latin was “translated integrally and very precisely.” The outcome was that it ended up imposing its decisions on bishops conferences. By recalling that the work of “faithfully preparing the versions of the liturgical books in current languages” needs to be carried out in a “collaboration full of reciprocal, attentive and creative confidence” between the bishops conferences and Rome, Pope Francis has transformed this situation.

In the Curia, however, certain offices have seen these changes as a loss of Rome’s power to make decisions that are binding for all dioceses.

A Catholic priest in Spain was forced to resign on Aug 28, a day after he welcomed a Hindu procession into the cathedral.

As per reports, local Hindus, carrying out a Ganesh Chaturthi procession, originally wanted to leave some floral offerings at the entrance of the church as a gesture of respect to Christians.  However, Vicar General Father Juan Jose Mateos Castro opened the doors of the church for the idol Ganesha and the procession. The video of the incident has gone viral on social media. However, it did not go down well with the people.

On Aug 28, Bishop Rafael Zornoza Boy issued a statement apologizing and expressing “deep sorrow for this unfortunate fact that has caused damage, confusion or scandal in the Christian community.”

The board of the Belgian Brothers of Charity announced on September 13, it will continue offering euthanasia to patients in their psychiatric centres, despite being ordered by the Vatican to stop doing so.

The “Broeders van Liefde” board had been given until the end of August to comply with the Vatican order, which was seen and approved by Pope Francis. Brothers of the order were also asked to sign a joint letter to their general superior, Brother René Stockman, confirming their adherence to Church teaching.

In a Sept.12 statement the organization defied the Vatican request and said it “continues to stand by its vision statement on euthanasia for mental suffering in a non-terminal situation.”
Furthermore, it claims that in adhering to this vision, the organization “is still consistent with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. We emphatically believe so.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2277, states that: “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacce-ptable.” The Brothers of Charity in Belgium run 15 psychiatric hospitals with 5,000 patients. The board controlling these institutions, which consists of a few Brothers but primarily of lay members, announced in the spring that they would permit euthanasia in their facilities.

The new law says that bishops now have the power to complete translations of the Mass from Latin into local languages. Pope Francis has issued a new law returning authority to bishops’ conferen-ces over liturgical translations, paving the way for the current English missal to be revised.

The new law, which is part of the Argentinian Pontiff’s attempts to shore up the reforms to Catholic worship started by the Second Vatican Council, says that bishops now have the power to complete translations of the Mass from Latin into local languages.

The Pope’s order “Magnum Principium” amends Canon Law (Canon 838.3) to say bishops are required to “faithfully” prepare and “approve” translations which are then confirmed by Rome. The words “faithfully” and “approve” are both new. This throws open the possibility that the 2011 English Roman Missal – which became mired in disagreement with claims that the Vatican had overly controlled the process – could be changed. The onus will now be on local bishops to take the initiative. Francis’ law also reverses moves by his predecess-ors to centralise the translation process, which saw Vatican officials editing, and re-writing the work of bishops’ confe-rences. The foundation stone to his new law, Francis explai-ned, is the “great principle” of Vatican II which stressed that “liturgical prayer be accommodated to the compre-hension of the people so that it might be understood.” This task, he pointed out, had originally been entrusted to the bishops in countries across the world.