On a snowy Saturday in January 20, German bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Georg Bätzing joined protesters at a demonstration near his residence in Limburg, in the central state of Hesse.
Bishop Georg Bätzing attends a Jan. 20, 2024, demonstration against racism, fascism, and the AfD in Limburg, Germany. .
Bätzing was one of the more than 100,000 people who took to the streets across Germany Jan. 20 in protest at the surging Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which is commonly described as far-right.
Dressed in a flat cap and wearing warm winter layers, Bätzing was photographed holding a German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) banner that said “Our alternative is called… respect and solidarity.”
Nearby stood a man in a wide-brimmed hat — perhaps a photobomber — with a sign that spelled out “AfD” with the words “Apes Fascists Dummies.”
The Diocese of Limburg said that organizers had expected 300 people to attend the demonstration “against racism, fascism and the Alternative for Germany,” but 3,000 turned up.
“The cold, ice, and snow couldn’t stop us,” said Bätzing. “It is important to be here and set an example for democracy, diversity, and tolerance.”
So what is it, exactly, that prompted the head of Germany’s bishops to demonstrate against one of the country’s political parties?
Bishop Georg Bätzing attends a Jan. 20, 2024, demonstration against racism, fascism, and the AfD in Limburg, Germany. © S.Schnelle/Bistum Limburg.
The Limburg diocese had explained the demonstration’s rationale in a press release issued the day before the rally, which was supported by groups including Germany’s Left Party, Green Youth, and the DGB.
“The background to the protests is the recently revealed secret meeting between leading AfD members and fascists and financiers in Potsdam, in which plans for the mass deportation of people after the AfD came to power were discussed,” the press release said.
A Jan. 20, 2024, demonstration against racism, fascism and the AfD in Limburg, Germany, beside the red and white residence of the Bishop of Limburg.

Pope Francis on the feast of the Epiphany lamented the sharp division among Catholics of differing views, saying believers must imitate the three wise men in putting God at the centre of their lives, rather than their own ideas of the faith.
Speaking to attendees of his Jan. 6 Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, the pope said that as members of the church, “instead of splitting into groups based on our own ideas, we are called to put God back at the center.”
“We need to abandon ecclesial ideologies to find the meaning of holy mother church, the ecclesial attitude. Ecclesial ideologies no, ecclesial vocation yes,” he said, saying, “The Lord, not our own ideas or our own projects,” must be the focus.
“Let us set out anew from God; let us seek from him the courage not to lose heart in the face of difficulties, the strength to surmount all obstacles, the joy to live in harmonious communion,” he said.Focusing on three aspects of the biblical narrative of the Magi, Francis noted that they are described as having their “eyes are raised to the heavens.”

Adaptation of book by Shûsaku Endô, who wrote the source novel for 2016’s Silence, is understood to be set mostly in the present day
Martin Scorsese is to follow up his triumphant true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon with an 80-minute film about Jesus designed to “take away the negative[s] … associated with organised religion”.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Scorsese explained the thinking behind the project, an adaptation of A Life of Jesus by writer Shûsaku Endô (a Japanese Catholic whose 1966 novel Silence was previously adapted by Scorsese). Scorsese said he and his writing collaborator Kent Jones had finished the screenplay and were “swimming in inspiration” for a film reportedly set largely in the present day that “focus[es] on Jesus’s core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytise”.
Scorsese said: “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organised religion.”
The director, 81, added: “Right now, ‘religion’, you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways. But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life – even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about.”
Scorsese said he was preparing to shoot the film in 2024, having been inspired to begin work on it after meeting Pope Francis in 2023 and participating in a conference title The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination, organised by Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica. At the time Scorsese told the press: “I have responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.”
Scorsese has a significant track record with films with overt religious themes. His 1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ triggered worldwide controversy and protests for its depiction of an alternative timeline for Jesus’s life, while Silence, released in 2016, portrayed the struggles of Jesuit priests persecuted for their religion in 17th-century Japan. In 1997 Scorsese also released Kundun, a biographical film about the Dalai Lama.

Amid a broad spectrum of reactions unleashed by Fiducia Supplicans, a new Vatican document permitting non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples, Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church has become the first eastern communion to declare explicitly that the document does not apply outside the Latin Church.
“On the basis of canon. 1492 of the CCCC this Declaration concerns purely the Latin Church and has no legal force for the faithful of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church,” said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Church, in a Dec. 22 statement.
Shevchuk was referring to a provision of the Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches, which states: “Laws enacted by the supreme authority of the Church, in which the passive subject is not expressly indicated, affect only the Christian faithful of the Eastern Churches insofar as they treat matters of faith or morals or declarations of divine law, or these Christian faithful are explicitly included in these laws, or they grant a favour which contains nothing contrary to the Eastern rites.”

Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, issued this reflection in support of the Holy Father’s recent remarks to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, which included a specific mention of the harms of surrogacy.
“Pope Francis strongly condemned the practice of surrogacy calling it ‘a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.’ He emphasized that a child is a gift and as such can ‘never (be) the basis of a commercial contract.’ Surrogacy represents the commodification and instrumentalization of a woman’s body, treating her as a ‘carrier’ rather than a human person. And just as troubling is the fact that the child is reduced to terms of buying and selling as an object of human trafficking.
“The commercialization of women and children in surrogacy is underlined by the belief that there is a right to have a child. The child becomes an object for the fulfillment of one’s desires instead of a person to be cherished. In this way, the genuine right of the child to be conceived through the love of his or her parents is overlooked in favor of ‘the right to have a child by any means necessary.’ We must avoid this way of thinking and answer the call to respect human life, beginning with the unborn child.

The episcopal conferences of Africa are united in the belief that “the extra-liturgical blessings proposed in the declaration Fiducia Supplicans cannot be carried out in Africa” without creating scandal.
Cardinal Fridolin Ambogo of Kinshasa, the president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) summarized the stands taken by the different bishops’ conferences of Africa in a January 11 statement. He reported:
The episcopal conferences generally prefer—each bishop remaining free in his diocese—not to offer blessing to same-sex couples.
The African bishops profess their “unwavering attachment to the Successor of Peter,” the cardinal said, but fear the “potential confusion and scandal” that could be caused by blessing couples in irregular unions. The Vatican’s declaration, he said, “has sown misconceptions and unrest in the minds of many lay faithful, consecrated persons and even pastors, and has aroused strong reactions.”
The rejection of blessings for irregular unions does not indicate a lack of pastoral care, the cardinal insisted. African bishops are committed to treating homosexual persons with “respect and dignity,” he said. “Clergy are encouraged to provide welcoming and supportive pastoral care, particular to couples in irregular situations.
The leaders of the French Catholic bishops’ conference have issued a statement encouraging priests to bless people “who humbly ask for God’s help,” but carefully avoided suggesting such blessings for couples.
The permanent council of the French episcopal conference issued its statement on January 10, evidently responding to the earlier statement from nine French bishops who announced that they would not authorize blessings for same-sex couples. The conference statement called for an “unconditional and merciful welcome” of those who seek blessings. But after mentioning the need to provide pastoral care for couples living in irregular unions, the statement refers to blessings for individuals.

Conservative American Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of Pope Francis’ fiercest critics, had his first private audience with the pontiff in seven years on December 29, a month after the pope said he was stripping him of some of his Vatican privileges.
Asked by Reuters outside his residence in Rome if the meeting had gone well, Burke responded: “Well, I’m still alive”.
The 75-year-old cardinal declined to further discuss the content of what was, according to Vatican records, his first private audience with Francis since Nov. 10, 2016.
Wearing a floor-length black overcoat and black hat and with rosary beads in his left hand, he walked away on a street near the Vatican.
The Vatican listed the meeting on the pope’s official schedule but, as is customary, did not say what was discussed.
Last month, Francis told Vatican officials at a regular meeting of department heads that he had decided to strip Burke of some of his Vatican privileges, including a rent-subsidised apartment, according to a person who was in the room at the time.
The official quoted the pope as saying that Burke was “working against the Church and against the papacy” and that he had sown “disunity” in the Church.
When asked on Friday, Burke also declined to discuss the apartment.
Burke is a hero to traditionalists in the Church, particularly in the U.S., where he often has been a guest on conservative Catholic media outlets that have made criticism of the pope a mainstay of their operations.

Attacks on 26 villages in Plateau State began December 23, led by suspected extremists among Fulani Muslim herdsman against Christian farming communities. Some media reports cite nearly 200 dead, with many missing as local residents fled from gunmen into the bush.
Grace Godwin was preparing Christmas Eve dinner when her husband burst in with news from the neighboring village, ordering her and the children into the fields. Rebecca Maska similarly took cover but was shot and bled for three hours until help arrived, while her son had his hand chopped off with a machete before escaping. Magit Macham dragged his wounded brother to safety and hid overnight until the attackers moved on.
“These attacks have been recurring,” Macham told Reuters, having returned home from the regional capital of Jos to celebrate Christmas. “They want to drive us out of our ancestral land.”
For years, violence has plagued the West African nation’s Middle Belt, where a predominantly Muslim north intersects with a predominantly Christian south. Land rights issues are also contested, as seminomadic cattle herders press against settled agrarian hamlets in Africa’s most populous nation.
The Christmas massacres were the worst attacks since 2018. A local publication tallied an additional 201 deaths in Plateau State in the first half of 2023. Across the Middle Belt, at least 2,600 people were killed in 2021, according to the most recent data by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
.

Bishop Gaspard Béby Gneba has called on the people of his diocese in western Ivory Coast to report priests who secretly have wives and families, as well as those who commit sexual or financial abuse.
“Any lay believer who knows that a priest is not faithful to his celibacy, has a wife or child, or has committed sexual abuse or economic crimes, must have the courage to report it to the bishop, otherwise, they commit a sin of complicity before God, the pope, and the Church,” Bishop Gneba said in an open letter to people of the Diocese of Man, which he read January 4 on diocesan radio.
“The pope speaks of zero tolerance for these priests,” said the 61-year-old bishop, a former seminary professor of spirituality and liturgy who has led the diocese since early 2008.
He said his message was “urgent, important, and necessary” and aimed at helping him in”the fight against sexual abuse, economic crimes within the clergy of Man, and the treatment of priests who have wives or children.”
After extensively reiterating these directives, he went on to discuss the “specific measures taken to transparently handle cases of sexual abuse or economic crimes committed by priests” in the diocese during his nearly 16 years at the helm.
“They must come to see me as soon as possible to submit their resignation,” he insisted, while deploring the behavior of some who “give the impression that priestly celibacy has been abolished or that continence is optional.”

Throughout 2023, more than 130 Catholic priests and religious were either arrested, kidnapped, or murdered, according to a new report on Catholic persecution published by Aid to the Church in Need.
The report published by the Catholic charity found at least 132 instances of arrests, kidnappings, and/or murders, which is slightly higher than the report from the previous year, which found 124. The uptick was mostly driven by arrests from authoritarian governments, which went up from 55 in 2022 to 86 in 2023.
Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on political dissent among members of the clergy was a primary driver of persecution throughout the year. The report found that the regime held 46 clergy in custody in 2023, including two bishops and four seminarians. This included 19 clerics arrested in December, including Bishop Isidoro de Carmen Mora Ortega of Siuna.
According to the report, many of the priests in Nicaragua who were arrested before December were either released or expelled from the country and refused reentry. The government also released two of the priests arrested in December, but the other 17 are still in custody.
Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who was arrested in August 2022 and sentenced to 26 years in prison after refusing to leave the country, is also still in custody.