The Jesuit publication “La Civiltà Cattolica” publishes a transcript of the dialogue between Pope Francis and the Jesuits of Portugal during the Pontiff’s visit to Lisbon for WYD 2023. In the conversation, the Holy Father addresses a range of topics, sharing insights on the Church’s challenges and his vision for inclusivity, doctrinal development, and the Synod.
In an open dialogue with the Jesuits of Lisbon during his visit to Portugal for World Youth Day, Pope Francis engaged with them in conversation and covered a wide array of topics, sharing profound insights on the Church’s contemporary challenges and his vision for inclusivity, doctrinal progression, and the Synod. Central to the discussion was the theme of inclusivity. Throughout World Youth Day in Lisbon, the rallying cry for an all-embracing Church resonated powerfully with the words “Todos, todos” (Everyone, everyone), pronounced by Pope Francis as he stressed that the Church “has space for everyone.” He emphasized the pivotal importance of creating a space for all individuals, irrespective of their sexual orientation or gender identity, within the Church. This message continued to echo through his exchange with the Jesuits of Portugal.

A Cameroonian priest and intellectual has published a ground-breaking book that could potentially change the way African Traditional Religion is perceived by the Catholic Church.
In Studying the Faith of Our Ancestors: A New Approach to African Traditional Religion, Father Humphrey Tatah Mbuy argues that African Traditional Religion has historically been misunderstood and denigrated, due to a lack of understanding of its intrinsic value. He argues that ATR must be studied as a religion in its own right, and contends that Christianity as we know it today actually has its roots in African Traditional religion. The book argues that Africans have always been a people steeped in faith, but the colonizing influence of the west made the African peoples feel inferior and their religious practices demonized.
“There are no pagan in Africa,” Mbuy told Crux in an exclusive interview shortly after the launch of the book on August 12. “There is no African who does not believe in the Supreme.”
The narrative has always been that God was brought to Africa by western missionaries. Is this book a negation of that narrative?
“Coming to Christianity, Jesus Christ would have been born African, because the Jews were in Egypt and we drove them out, and when they went out he came back to Africa, and would have been still back in his home and we again drove them out. … There is no such thing as a “pagan” in Africa.”

Catholics in Argentina appear both somewhat startled and also divided by the surprising recent success of a firebrand politician who’s termed the country’s most famous native son, Pope Francis, a “communist,” an “imbecile” and even a “leftist son of a b*.”
That politician, Javier Milei, was the big winner of the country’s Aug. 13 primaries, coming in first place with 30% of the vote, ahead of both the major right and left-wing coalitions, and despite lacking a strong party structure of his own.
Milei ended up ahead of Patricia Bullrich, whose right-wing coalition obtained 28% of the ballots, and of Sergio Massa, the current Economy Minister in Argentina’s center-left Peronist coalition, who got 27%of support.
In another tweet last year, Milei criticized Francis after the pontiff said citizens should pay taxes to protect the poor’s dignity. Milei asserted that the pontiff was “always standing on the evil’s side” and told him: “Your model is poverty.”
Once during a TV show, Milei was criticizing the concept of social justice and attacked Pope Francis for his defense of it, calling him “the imbecile who is in Rome.”
During an interview earlier this year to a progressive Argentinian journalist, Francis appeared indirectly to compare Milei to Adolf Hitler, saying that the Austrian-born dictator was initially presented as “a new politician, who spoke beautifully, who seduced the people.”
“Everybody voted for little Adolfo, and that is how we ended, right?” the pope said, adding that he fears “saviours without history.” He also declared that he was worried about the progress of the far-right around the world.
In general, observers in Argentina say that Catholic reaction to Milei’s verbal assaults on the pope break largely along political lines, with progressives expressing outrage but conservatives largely silent.
“Many [Argentine Catholics] were happy about [Francis’s] election as the pope in 2013, but disliked his ideas and the documents he released and ceased to approve of him,” said Father Lorenzo De Vedia, known as “Padre Toto,” a priest who works at a slum in Buenos Aires.

The Director of the Holy See Press Office says the second part of the Laudato si’ encyclical letter which Pope Francis mentioned on August 21 will focus on the recent climate crises.
Speaking off-the-cuff to a delegation of lawyers from member countries of the Council of Europe on August 21, Pope Francis said he was writing a second part of his Laudato si’ encyclical to update it to “current issues”.
The Pope was expressing his appreciation for the attorneys’ commitment to developing a legal framework aimed at protecting the environment.
“We must never forget that the younger generations have the right to receive a beautiful and livable world from us, and that this implies that we have a grave responsibility towards creation which we have received from the generous hands of God,” said the Pope. “Thank you for your contribution.”
In a statement later, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, explained that the new updated version of Laudato si’ will focus in particular on the most recent extreme weather events and catastrophes affecting people across five continents.

The chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party warned on August 17 of efforts from the Chinese government to subvert Christianity by changing parts of the Bible.
“The Chinese Communist Party is rewriting the Bible,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wiscon-sin, said in a pre-recorded message to the biannual gathering of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago held Aug. 14 through Aug. 18.
Gallagher discussed two examples in which the Chinese government has rewritten parts of the Bible and taught it as fact. In one example, he noted a mis-representation of the account in the Gospel of John in which Christ says, “Let he among you with-out sin cast the first stone” when a woman is accused of adultery.
“It’s a beautiful story of forgiveness and mercy – unless, of course, you’re a CCP official,” Gallagher said. “Then it’s a story of a dissident challenging the authority of the state. A possible sneak preview of what a Bible with socialist characteristics might look like appeared in a Chinese university textbook in 2020. The rewritten Gospel of John excerpt ends not with mercy but with Jesus himself stoning the adulterous woman to death.”

Pakistani authorities on August 21 handed out thousands of dollars to nearly 100 Christian families whose homes were destroyed or damaged by a Muslim mob angered over an alleged desecration of the Quran last week.
The government of caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said each household was getting 2 million rupees ($6,800) in compensation on Monday. Police said they have arrested dozens more rioters in ongoing raids, bringing the total number of those detained over the attacks in the city of Jaranwala to 160.
On August 16, hundreds of Muslims went on a rampage over allegations that a Christian man and his friend had desecrated Islam’s holy book. Christians who fled their homes to escape the attackers later returned to a scene of destruction. Many have been living outside since, fearing the burned structures may collapse.
The rampage, one of the most destructive in the country’s history, drew nationwide condemnation. Kakar on Monday traveled to the area to meet with some of the victims of the attacks and hand out the compensation. He promised in a televised speech that the state will ensure the protection of minorities, including Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Ahmadis.
Kakar said none of the rioters will go unpunished, describing those behind the attacks as “enemies of humanity.”
Earlier in the day, Mohsin Naqvi, the top official in Punjab province, where Jaranwala is located, announced the compensations on X, previously known as Twitter. Naqvi visited the city on Sunday and held a meeting of local officials at a burned church.
“They are worried for their safety, they are worried for their children, who witnessed the tragedy and are traumatized,” priest Khalid Mukhtar said of the local Christians. All 26 churches in Jaranwala were attacked, burned or damaged, he said.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller has called it a “hostile takeover” of the Catholic Church. The late Cardinal George Pell termed it a “toxic nightmare.” Now, Cardinal Raymond Burke has written a foreword to a new book denouncing the Synod on Synodality as a “Pandora’s Box” that threatens to unleash grave harm on the Mystical Body of Christ.
The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box, co-authored by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue, presents readers with a series of 100 questions and answers aimed at informing the general public about a debate they say has been “largely limited to insiders” despite its “potentially revolutionary impact.”
In his forward, Cardinal Burke, a former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, writes: “We are told that the Church which we profess, in communion with our ancestors in the faith from the time of the Apostles, to be One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, is now to be defined by synodality, a term which has no history in the doctrine of the Church and for which there is no reasonable definition.
“Synodality and its adjective, synodal, have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideo-logy which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practiced,” he adds.
The American cardinal warns: “It is not a purely theoretical matter, for the ideology has al-ready, for some years, been put into practice in the Church in Germany, spreading widely con-fusion and error and their fruit, division – indeed schism, to the grave harm of many souls. With the imminent Synod on Synodality, it is rightly to be feared that the same confusion and error and division will be visited upon the universal Church. In fact, it has already begun to happen through the preparation of the Synod at the local level.”
Announced by Pope Francis in 2021, the Synod on Synodality is being held in three phases: local, continental and universal. In October, the universal stage will begin with the sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which will bring together 300 bishops and laity at the Vatican. A second assembly is to be held in 2024. Earlier this year, Pope Francis took the unprecedented step of granting equal voting rights to both episcopal and non-episcopal members.
Released on August 22 in eight languages, The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box clearly and concisely answers a whole host of questions surrounding the controversial event. Drawing on official Synod documents and a wide range of sources, topics include the nature of the Synod of Bishops and changes Pope Francis has introduced, the synodal process.

Reflecting both the symbolic and the strategic importance of the world’s youngest independent nation, Pope Francis’s top dip-lomat recently urged South Sudan not to succumb to the “plague of vengeance” on his third trip to the African state.
Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin said on August 17 in the largely Christian nation, which has been marred by violence since gaining independence in 2011, that for-giveness is “the key that unlocks the door to peace and justice – the forgiveness that Christ won for us on the cross.”
The Vatican Secretary of State was speaking in the South Suda-nese city of Rumbek.
“Either we disarm our heart and give up violent means of solv-ing our differences, or we destroy ourselves,” Parolin said.
He called on South Sudan to “look beyond all differences” and explore ways of bridging the country’s divides.
After winning its independe-nce from Sudan in 2011, the new nation quickly became mired in seemingly intractable internal conflict.
What started as a political spat between the dominant political elite has degenerated into ethnic violence, pitting President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, against Vice President Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer. Kiir accused Machar of fomenting a coup, prompting Machar to flee the capital city of Juba.
“The return of the country to violence is more evident than the country staying in stability,” he said.
“We know what it means to live in a continual state of inse-curity and fear,” Parolin told con-gregants in Rumbek, but noted that perfect love can drive out fear.

A leading Catholic expert on African affairs has said that competition over mineral wealth as part of what’s often referred to as a “New Colonialism” is at the heart of most of the continent’s conflicts, and that African leaders themselves are often complicit in creating and prolonging the violence.
Referring specifically to a conflict between the government of Mozambique and Islamic militants in the country’s northeastern province of Cabo Delgado, which has claimed an estimated 5,000 lives and displaced some 1 million people since fighting broke out in 2017, Johan Viljoen of the Denis Hurley Peace Institute of South Africa told Crux that “the conflict in Mozambique (and in most other parts of Africa) is about control over mineral wealth.”
Viljoen’s institute is an associate body of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference.
His comments came in the wake of the institute’s recent second International Symposium, which was organized collaboratively with the Technical University of Würzburg-Schweinfurt and other Catholic and civil society organizations.
Bringing together scholars, religious leaders, community members as well as internally displaced persons who fled from the conflict in Cabo Delgado province, the symposium took place in the Diocese of Nicala, Mozambique, under the theme “Working for a just, socially cohesive and conflict-resistant economic trans-formation to build lasting peace processes.”
It focused on decolonization, with Viljoen stating that most African countries rich in natural resources are “subject to economic colonialism coupled with endless wars.”

Reflecting on Christ’s encounter with the Canaanite woman who pleaded for the healing of her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28), Pope Francis said during his August 20 Angelus address that “Jesus changed his attitude. What made him change it was the strength of the woman’s faith.”
Jesus “was directing his preaching to the chosen people,” the Pope told pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square. “Later the Holy Spirit would push the Church to the ends of the world. But what happens here, we could say, is an anticipation through which the universality of God’s work is already manifested in the episode of the Canaanite woman.”
“Jesus’ openness is interesting,” the Pope continued, as he commented on what he described as the Savior’s change in attitude. “Faced with her concrete case, he becomes even more sympathetic and compassionate. This is what God is like: he is love, and the one who loves does not remain rigid.”
The Pope added: Yes, he or she stands firm, but not rigid, they do not remain rigid in their own positions, but allow themselves to be moved and touched. He or she knows how to change their plans.
Love is creative. And we Christians who want to imitate Christ, we are invited to be open to change. How good it would do our relationships, as well as our lives of faith, if we were to be docile, to truly pay attention, to soften up in the name of compassion and the good of others, like Jesus did with the Canaanite woman. The docility to change. Hearts docile to change.
“We can ask ourselves a few questions, beginning with the change in Jesus,” Pope Francis said at the conclusion of his address. “For example: Am I capable of changing opinion? Do I know how to be understanding and do I know how to be compassionate, or do I remain rigid in my position? Is there some rigidity in my heart? Which is not firmness: rigidity is awful, firmness is good.”
The Pontiff also commented on the Canaanite woman’s faith and prayer, as he had done in his previous Angelus addresses on the Gospel passage (2017, 2020).