“More than 365 million Christians, approximately 1 in 7, face high levels of persecution for their faith,” Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Vatican secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, said at a conference on religious freedom held in Rome.
The conference, titled “Religious Freedom and Integral Human Development: A New Global Platform,” was jointly organized by the Sovereign Order of Malta, the Atlantic Council, and several universities, including the Pontifical Urban University of Rome and the University of Notre Dame.
In his speech, Gallagher said attacks on churches and Christian properties “increased significantly in 2023, with more Christians than ever before reporting violent attacks.” The prelate went on to describe his concern that “according to some estimates, almost 4.9 billion people live in countries with serious or very serious violations of religious freedom.”
The Vatican diplomat underscored that religious freedom, “although not the only aspect of human rights, is probably the most fundamental,” adding that “the violation of the right to religious freedom has the effect of undermining not only one right but also the entire category of human rights,” he added.
“Religious freedom plays a decisive role in achieving integral human development,” Gallagher continued. For this reason, he added, “the state should exercise a detached neutrality and grant religious groups and all individuals an equal right to the public manifestation of their religious convictions.”

“As long as a person is alive, there is always hope, a desire to see things change for the better and believe that we can make a difference.” Speaking to Vatican News, Father Roman Ostrovskyy, Vice-Rector of the Greek-Catholic seminary in Kyiv, shares his reflections on the Bull “Spes non confundit,” with which Pope Francis recently proclaimed the upcoming Jubilee Year.
Father Roman is a biblical scholar, having studied biblical theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and now teaches in seminary. “I read the text of the bull carefully,” he says, “and found many beautiful and interesting themes. For example, an important passage is where the Holy Father says that the Christian life is a journey, and the goal of this journey, and also of the Jubilee Year, is the encounter with the Lord Jesus. Catholics and all Christians in Ukraine feel this protective presence of Jesus.”
“However,” he says, “on the other hand, we all see a tremendous growth in discouragement. We are in the third year of war, and people feel it deeply: they are tired, losing hope that things here can change for the better, that our voices will be heard.”
The young priest recounts that when full-scale war broke out in his country, there was much fear and confusion about what was happening. “But,” he emphasizes, “there was hope because Ukraine was defending itself strongly; some-thing was happening.”
“It is really difficult for us to think about tomorrow,” Fr Roman says. “In Ukraine, it is not realistic to plan more than a week in advance. Air raid sirens sound, adults and children hide in shelters… Everyone is waiting for what will happen next, which piece of land will be taken away. And the worst part is that we are not able to oppose it alone. Sometimes, it feels like we are being watched like a computer game, where it is interesting to see what happens, but no one wants to fully participate and help the people in need of simple assistance, and fundamentally, just stop the aggressor.”

Pope Francis has announced he is pre-paring to write a document dedicated to that devotion to “illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal, but also to say some-thing significant to a world that seems to have lost its heart.” Speaking during the weekly General Audience – his first in June, the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart – he recalled that last 27 December marked the 350th anniversary of the first of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque’s visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
He said that, on that date, celebrations for this devotion began in many countries across the world, and that they will conclude on 27 June next year. For this reason, the Pope said, he is preparing “a document that gathers the precious reflections of previous magisterial texts and a long history dating back to the Holy Scriptures, to reintroduce today, to the whole Church, this devotion full of spiritual beauty.”
“I believe it will be very beneficial for us to meditate on various aspects of the Lord’s love that can illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal; but also to say something significant to a world that seems to have lost its heart,” he said. Thus, Pope Francis asked believers to accompany him in prayer during this time of preparation, with the intention of making this document public next September.

“All of my predecessors were priests and bishops,” Sr M. Isa-bell explained with a smile. The Schoenstatt Sister of Mary was referring to her appointment as President of the Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia, the count-ry’s only ecclesiastical faculty, which confers Pontifical degrees in Sacred Theology. The faculty was established in 1954 for Aus-tralia, New Zealand and Oceania. Sr M. Isabell Naumann, a Ger-man-born member of the Secular Institute of the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary (ISSM), was appointed President of the Catholic Institute of Sydney in 2018 by Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP.
Prior to her appointment, Sr M. Isabell worked for many years as professor at the Catholic Insti-tute of Sydney. Her appointment as president of the Institute still came as a surprise. In an inter-view with Vatican News, Sr M. Isabell said, “There are not too many women who lead ecclesia-stical faculties or universities. Ours goes back to the 1880s, and it became an ecclesiastical facu-lty in 1956. All of my predece-ssors were priests and bishops.” Three years after her appointment as President of the Catholic In-stitute of Sydney, in October 2021, Sr M. Isabell was called by Pope Francis to be a member of the In-ternational Theological Commi-ssion (ITC).
In her opinion, there should be a stronger presence of women in such commissions like the ITC. She finds this important, “so that you have more complementary thinking.”
“It is very important because we might deal with the same to-pic, but you have different ways of approaching the topic, and in my eyes that is a very important complement, and that needs to come together when you deal with anything in theology,” she ex-plained, expressing her hope that there will be more women on such commissions in future.
Pope Francis often stresses the importance of woman and their role within the Church.

Pope Francis formally recognized a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Carlo Acutis, paving the way for the young Italian, who died of leukemia at age 15, to become the first canonized saint from the millennial generation.
If you know anything about Carlo Acutis, you probably know that he loved going to Mass and helping the poor and downtrodden he encountered. A boy of strong faith despite not having grown up in a particularly religious household, Carlo was also known to spend hours adoring Christ in the Eucharist.
But you may have also seen him described as the Catholic Church’s first “tech-savvy” saint. And for good reason. Carlo was born in 1991 – the same year the World Wide Web came online in all its snail’s-pace, dial-up glory. And like so many of his generational peers, Carlo quickly embraced the internet’s possibilities, despite the technology still being relatively in its infancy; Google wasn’t even founded until Carlo was 7. But Carlo’s mother remembers the young whiz kid proudly describing himself as a “computer scientist” – well before he got his first computer as a gift around the year 2000.

With the document Towards October 2024 sent last December to all the bishops of the world, the General Secretariat of the Synod asked the local churches and groups of Churches to deepen some aspects of the Synthesis Report that are fundamental to the theme of the Synod, starting from a guiding question of the entire synodal process: ‘HOW to be a synodal Church in mission?’ During these months, the individual local Churches have carried out their work by sending their contribution through the Bishops’ Conferences, the Eastern Catholic Churches and the International Reunions of Bishops’ Conferences.
“I am particularly impressed to see the involvement of the entire church community in this long process of discernment”, says Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the General Secretariat of the Synod. “In addition to the reflections arising from the Synthesis Report of the First Session, the material received often adds real testimonies on how the particular churches not only understand synodality, but also how they are already putting this style into practice. The synodal Church is not a dream to be realised, but already a living reality that generates creativity and new relational models within the same local community or between different churches or church groupings’.
From Tuesday, 4 June 2024, the group of theologians, experts in various disciplines (dogmatic theology, ecclesiology, pastoral theology, canon law, etc.), will analyse all this material. ‘We are not leaving anything to chance. Each document is to be carefully read with the aim that at the end of this meeting, the group will present a text that reflects the work, questions and insights received from the grassroots” says Cardinal Grech.

The suspect, a former employee of the Fabbrica di San Pietro – the office responsible for the basilica’s upkeep – reportedly attempted to sell an 18-page manuscript, which had been missing from its archives, back to the basilica. The Italian newspaper Domani first reported the arrest on June 6, and the Vatican prosecutor’s office later confirmed it.
Though it is not clear where the manuscript was obtained, Domani reported that the suspect was arrested on May 27 after a fabricated transaction in which Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, arch-priest of St Peter’s Basilica, ex-changed a check for 120,000 euros (about $195,000) for the manuscript. Upon leaving the meeting with the cardinal, the suspect was taken into custody, interrogated and arrested.
According to Vatican News, the manuscript describes specifications for gilding the friezes on the baldachin, or canopy, that towers over the main altar of St Peter’s Basilica; the baldachin was designed and constructed by Bernini in the early 17th century. The manuscript reappeared in 2021 when a photocopy of it was used in a book on Bernini. The suspect was the editor of the volume and after its publication began negotiations with the basilica to sell the manuscript. Alessandro Diddi, the Vatican’s chief prosecutor, is expected to reach a decision about the indictment this week.

Pope Francis urged people to reflect on whether they are sacrificing their serenity and freedom to be enslaved by money, power, and pleasure. Speaking in his Angelus address on June 9, the pope asked people to contemplate the temptations that can imprison us and the freedom found in Christ.
“If we let ourselves be conditioned by the quest for pleasure, power, money, or consensus, we become slaves to these things,” he said. “If instead we allow God’s freely-given love to fill us and expand our heart, and if we let it overflow spontaneously by giving it back to others with our whole selves without fear, calculation, or conditioning, then we grow in freedom and spread its good fragrance around us in our homes, in our families, and in our communities.”
In his speech from the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, the pope highlighted the many ways in which “Jesus was a free man.” Jesus was not enslaved by wealth but embraced “a poor life full of uncertainties, freely taking care of the sick and whoever came to ask him for help, without ever asking for anything in return.”
“He was free with regard to power,” Francis added. “Indeed, despite calling many to follow him, he never obliged anyone to do so, nor did he ever seek out the support of the powerful but always took the side of the least, teaching his disciples to do like-wise.” The Lord was also free from the need “for fame and approval, and for this reason, he never gave up speaking the truth,” he said. Pope Francis underlined that Jesus never gave up speaking the truth “even at the cost of not being understood or becoming unpopular – even to the point of dying on the cross.”

The Vicar General of the Diocese of Kafanchan, Ni-geria, has decried the kidna-pping of yet another priest in the area.” “While we pray for the safe release of Father Ukeh,” Fr Emmanuel Kazah Faweh said, “we condemn the incessant kidnappings for ransom of innocent and defenceless citizens of our parishes.” Father Gabriel Ukeh was kidnapped by armed men who broke into the rectory of St Thomas Church in northwestern Nigeria in the early hours of Sunday, 9 June.
Kidnappings are rampant throughout Nigeria, with bandits and insurgents taking people captive for hefty ransoms, but also for political or ideological reasons. More than 4,000 kidnappings have occurred since May 2023. Earlier this year, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization issued a statement denouncing the wave of kidnappings and expressing its “deepest and heartfelt solidarity” with the Nigerian people in the face of the crisis.

After being forced to leave their homes in the Iraqi city of Mosul because of religious extre-mism and violence ten years ago, very few Christian families have returned home. According to Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Amel Shimon Nona, the majority of the 1,200 Christian families had left the city of Mosul due to the violence carried out by the so-called Islamic State (IS).
In an interview with the Vatican’s Fides news agency, the Archbishop said he and his priests sought refuge in the villages of the Nineveh Plain, such as Kra-mles and Tilkif, during the height of the war. “Our church, dedicat-ed to the Holy Spirit, was looted by gangs of thieves while the city was being taken over by IS. How-ever, the Muslim families living nearby called the Islamist mili-tiamen, who intervened and put an end to the looting,” said Abp Nona. Christians began departing in droves after IS “marked” their homes for expropriation. Two nuns and three teenagers were tempo-rarily kidnapped by the jihadists. Then, in January 2015, the soldiers of IS expelled from Mosul ten elderly Chaldean and Syrian Ca-tholic Christians after they refused to renounce Christianity and con-vert to Islam.