On 10 July, the seminarians in a house of formation in the Ahiara diocese woke as usual; but their morning prayer was anything but routine. The atmosphere was like a graveyard. The deadline given by Pope Francis for all the priests of the diocese to pledge obedience to him and apologise for their rejection of the appointment of Peter Okpalaeke as their bishop had passed the previous day.

The 40 or so seminarians had one prayer intention that morning: that the situation in the diocese be resolved quickly, so that they could finally be ordained, five years after some of them had completed their formation. Exactly two weeks after the 30-day papal ultimatum to all Ahiara Catholic priests to apologise and accept Peter Okpalaeke as their bishop, the 529-member Ahiara Diocese Worldwide Laity Council has written another letter to Pope Francis, praying for justice and protection from a “rapacious predator.” The latest letter dated Sunday, July 23, 2017, was signed by 529 members of a global network of Catholics with roots and or relationships traceable to the Ahiara Presbyterium, of Nigeria, constituted to promote the social and pastoral health of members and the Diocese, using all resources available to them globally. Entitled: “We pray to you for justice, for a Bishop Incardinated in our Presbyterium—We Have Been Taken Advantage of, as Orphans,” the letter openly accused Emeritus Francis Cardinal Arinze of being behind the oppression of “orphan diocese,” and passionately pleaded with the Catholic Pontiff to deliver them from miscarriage of justice. According to the signatories, “it is against this background, that we collectively raise our clenched fists in prayer to you, to give us justice, to protect your ‘orphan diocese’ from the rapacious predator who, like a proverbial king of the world, would stump at an ant to deny it microscopic crumbs.

While Rome reels from one of its worst droughts in decades, the Vatican is doing its part to conserve water by shutting down the city-state’s 100 fountains. The office governing Vatican City State announced July 25 that the drought has “led the Holy See to take measures aimed at saving water” by shutting down fountains in St. Peter’s Square, throughout the Vatican Gardens and in the territory of the state.

In a tribute to the late Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI praised the German prelate for his “conviction that the Lord does not leave His Church, even if at times the ship is almost filled to the point of shipwreck.”

The message from the retired Pontiff, which was read out at Cardinal Meisner’s funeral by Archbishop Georg Ganswein, suggested that Benedict saw the Church as enduring a time of crisis.
In a candid passage of his message, Benedict wrote:

“What struck me particularly in the last conversations with the Cardinal, now gone home, was the natural cheerfulness, the inner peace and the assurance he had found. We know that it was hard for him, the passionate shepherd and pastor of souls, to leave his office, and this precisely at a time when the Church had a pressing need for shepherds who would oppose the dictatorship of the zeitgeist, fully resolved to act and think from a faith standpoint. Yet I have been all the more impressed that in this last period of his life he learned to let go, and live increasingly from the conviction that the Lord does not leave his Church, even if at times the ship is almost filled to the point of shipwreck.

Pope Francis has approved a fourth pathway to possible sainthood — giving one’s life in a heroic act of loving service to others.

In a new apostolic letter, the Pope approved new norms allowing for candidates to be considered for sainthood because of the heroic way they freely risked their lives and died prematurely because of “an extreme act of charity.”

The document, given “motu proprio” (on his own initiative) went into effect the same day of its publication on July 11, with the title “Maiorem hac dilectionem,” which comes from the Gospel according to St John (15:13): “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Archbishop Marcello Bartolucci, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes, said the addition is meant “to promote heroic Christian testimony, [that has been] up to now without a specific process, precisely because it did not completely fit within the case of martyrdom or heroic virtues.”

For centuries, consideration for the sainthood process required that a Servant of God heroically lived a life of Christian virtues or had been martyred for the faith. The third, less common way, is called an equivalent or equipollent canonization: when there is evidence of strong devotion among the faithful to a holy man or woman, the Pope can waive a lengthy formal canonical investigation and can authorize their veneration as saints.

While these three roads to sainthood remain unchanged, they were not adequate “for interpreting all possible cases” of holiness, the archbishop wrote in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, on July 11. According to the apostolic letter, any causes for beatification according to the new pathway of “offering of life” would have to meet the following criteria:

— Free and willing offer of one’s life and a heroic acceptance, out of love, of a certain and early death; the heroic act of charity and the premature death are connected.

— Evidence of having lived out the Christian virtues — at least in an ordinary, and not necessarily heroic, way — before having offered one’s life to others and until one’s death.

— Evidence of a reputation for holiness, at least after death.

— A miracle attributed to the candidate’s intercession is needed for beatification.

Christians made up the majority of refugees admitted to the U.S. in the first five full months of the Trump administration, reversing a trend that saw Muslims entering the country at higher numbers under President Obama, a new Pew Research report shows.

Out of all the refugees who arrived between President Trump’s inauguration and June 30, about half were Christians and 38% were Muslims, according to data released July 12.

But when monthly figures are viewed, the data (originally from the U.S. State Department) reveals a steady decline for Muslims, from about 50% of refugees in February to 31% in June.

This comes at a time when the origin of most of the world’s refugees continues to be Muslim-majority countries. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, Syria continues to account for a significant proportion of newly displaced refugees, with more than half of all new refugees worldwide fleeing the conflict in that country. Afghanistan and Somalia also top the list.

Russia’s Orthodox church has reported a sharp rise in seminary admissions, with the highest numbers ever recorded now training for the priesthood in its 261 eparchies, or dioceses.

The Interfax news agency said 1593 ordinands were expected to begin studies this summer, a 19 percent increase from 2016, while a further 827 young men would also join the church’s preparatory course, or propaedeuticum, a quarter more than last year. It added that a total of 5877 semi-narians were now preparing for ordination, a figure comparable to that of Poland’s Catholic Church in its peak years 1985-7.

The Russian church was savagely persecuted under Soviet rule in 1917-1991, but is now by far the largest of the world’s 14 Orthodox denominations, claiming 144 million members, with 368 bishops and around 40,000 priests and deacons. The church, which has 926 functioning monasteries and convents, is estimated to have opened three places of worship daily over the past three decades, bringing the total to 36,000 compared to just 6000 at the end of communist rule.