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).

A Brazilian priest who specializes in psychological and pastoral approaches to preventing suicide and self-harm is raising the alarm at the Vatican following the suicides of at least 40 priests in Brazil over the past seven years.
Loneliness, stress and excessive demands are driving priests to kill themselves, concludes Fr. Lício de Araújo Vale, from the diocese of São Miguel Paulista, after his extensive research into the ministries of the 40 priests who took their own lives between 2016 and 2023.
Several priests who committed suicide were accused of sexual abuse, a key factor Fr. Vale omits to mention in his article titled “The Suicide of Priests in Brazil,” published in the Portuguese edition of Vatican News on July 27.
In fact, the first priest Vale named was Fr. Bonifácio Buzzi, a 57-year-old Brazilian priest who hanged himself in his solitary confinement prison cell using bed sheets at the Tres Coracoes prison in the state of Minas Gerais.
Buzzi was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2007 for the rape of a 9-year-old boy six years earlier.
In 2015, he was released from prison and other complaints were filed against him. In 2016, he was rearrested for the rape of two other minors in the rural area of Tres Coracoes.
Father Vale’s research ends with the suicide of Fr. Mário Castro Ribeiro, a much-loved 55-year-old priest from the parish of São Francisco das Chagas in the diocese of Roraima. The diocese refused to reveal the cause of Fr. Ribeiro’s death.
In India, five priests committed suicide in just ten months between October 2019 and July 2020.

Christians in Zhejiang province in eastern China have expressed their disappointment over a government plan to resume demolition of crosses in line with the socialist principles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The province, home to about two million Protestants and about 200,000 Catholic Christians, has endured demolition of hundreds of crosses since 2014.
In the latest case, local authorities issued a notice to Dongqiao Christian Church in Zhejiang on Aug. 3 that stated the cross installed at the church premises will be “forcefully” removed, ChinaAid reported on Aug. 8.
An unnamed pastor at the church criticized the move by the government saying it is harmful for the peace and tranquility of the society in China.
The “demonic wind of removing crosses may rise again,” the pastor told ChinaAid.
Following the government move the church has issued a public notice urging “brothers and sisters in Christ to pray fervently for this matter.”
The pastor said last month that the governments of Shanxi Town, Yongjia County, and Lucheng District demanded that churches remove Christian phrases from public view.
Reportedly, the authorities had ordered the removal of bronze plaques and characters on church walls bearing the words “Emmanuel,” “Jesus,” “Christ,” and “Jehovah.”
Media reports say the province with a significant Christian population came under crackdown since Xi Jinping became China’s president.
Between 2014 and 2016, more than 1,500 churches were affected by cross demolitions in Zhejiang, ChinaAid stated.

On April 28, 2014, Wenzhou City’s local government forcibly removed the cross of Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou which is popularly known as “the Jerusalem of the East” for its large Christian population.

The Church “does not have doors”, and therefore everyone can come in, but truly “everyone, everyone, everyone, without any exclusion.” This is the message on which Pope Francis insisted most during his travel to Lisbon, in the run-up to a synod that – in its “Instrumentum laboris” – puts at the top of the list of those invited to enter “the divorced and remarried, people in polygamous marriages, or LGBTQ+ Catholics.”
But meanwhile in Italy, where Francis is bishop of Rome and primate, the churches are emptying out. An in-depth survey conducted for the magazine “Il Timone” by Euromedia Research has determined that today only 58.4 % of Italian citizens over the age of 18 identify themselves as “Catholics,” as opposed to the 37% who are “non-believers.” And those who go to Mass on Sundays are just 13.8 % of the population, mostly over 45, with even lower numbers in Lombardy and Veneto, the regions that have been the historic stronghold of the Italian “Catholic world.”
Not only that. Even among “practicing” Catholics, those who go to Mass once or more a month, just one out of three recognizes in the Eucharist “the real body of Christ,” while the others reduce it to a vague “symbol” or a “commemoration of the bread of the last supper.” And also just one in three are those who go to confession at least once a year, still convinced that it is a sacrament for the “remission of sins.” It comes as no surprise that the Benedictine theologian Elmar Salmann should have said in a June 14 interview with “L’Osservatore Romano” that even more concerning for him than the number of the faithful is the decline of sacramental practice, which “is about to go under.”

In north central Nigeria, a Missionary of Africa – Fr. Paul Salongo – was kidnapped alongside a Seminarian, Melchior, from the parish of St Luke Gyedna, in Niger State’s Paikoro government area.
On August 3, the bandits entered, firing into the air, from the parish residence, and removed the White Father and the Seminarian.
The bishop of Minna, Mons. Martins Igwe Uzoukwu, sent a memo to all the parishes in Niger State, inviting the faithful to pray for the abducted.
“On behalf of my Auxiliary Mons. Sylvester Luka Gopep, the priests and the members of religious orders in the Catholic Diocese of Minna. I ask you to pray for Fr. Paul Sanogo (Missionary of Africa) and the Seminarian, Melchior, who were taken by bandits in the early hours of August 3, 2023, at the priest’s residence in Gyedna, in Niger State”, the memo read.
However, in confirming the double kidnapping, a police spokesperson also claimed that other seminarians in the area have been advised to temporarily relocate while the search for the two abducted persons is ongoing.

The head of the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), which claims to be the world’s largest association of funeral professionals, says traditional burials are less popular and the demand for cremation is on the rise.
The reason? According to NFDA President Jack Mitchell, it’s because fewer Americans are likely to be churchgoers.
“Traditionally when someone lost a loved one, they would have a viewing and then they would be taken to their church for a funeral service and then onto the cemetery for a burial,” Mitchell told Business Insider earlier this month. “But more and more people don’t go to church, so a religious aspect to however they memorialize their loved one is not important to them.
Even amid an ongoing decline in church attendance post-COVID, an NFDA report released last August stated that cremation gained more mainstream acceptance after pandemic restrictions imposed by state and local governments forced families who lost loved ones to improvise.
According to the NFDA, 41% of funeral home clients chose direct cremation, while another 35% chose cremation along with a memorial service. Less than a quarter of funeral home clients chose a casketed adult funeral with viewing and cremation, according to the report.
By 2035, the trade group projects the cremation rate for all 50 U.S. states will exceed 50%.
Those numbers dovetail with a report released in January which found that the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing lockdowns accelerated a steep decline in church attendance, particularly among young people.
And as fewer Americans identify with the Christian faith, the demand for traditional burial ceremonies is also expected to decline.
“So that brings up then, ‘Do we need to have mom in a casket?’” said Mitchell. “We’re not going to be taking her to church. Is cremation a possibility?’”

Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako said in the Aug. 1 letter that he would only consider returning to the Iraqi capital if President Abdul Latif Rashid formally recognized him as the leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church and the holder of all its endowments.
Sako relocated July 21 to Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region weeks after Rashid revoked a 2013 presidential decree acknowledging that the cardinal is the head of the roughly 630,000-strong Eastern Catholic Church and the figure responsible for overseeing its assets.
“Without this decree, I will remain in Erbil [the capital of  Kurdistan Region] until your term ends, and work with the new president to issue an official decree that continues with a tradition that dates back 14 centuries,” Sako told Rashid, whose four-year term ends in October 2026.
In the letter, entitled “A final message to His Excellency the President of the Republic, Dr. Abdul Latif Rashid,” Sako said he had learned that the president was in the process of issuing identity papers to Iraqi Church leaders.

Spiritual worldliness is one of the most dangerous temptations facing priests and the Church because it “reduces spirituality to appearance” while disconnecting it from the Gospel, Pope Francis warned in a recently released letter to the priests of Rome.
“[Spiritual worldliness] leads us to be ‘workers of the spirit,’ men clad of sacred forms that actually continue to think and act according to the fashions of the world,” the pope wrote.
The pope’s message was communicated in a lengthy letter released by the Vatican on August 7 but which was dated Aug. 5, the memorial of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome. The pope is the bishop of Rome and wrote the letter to provide what he described as the comfort of a “fraternal encounter.”
In his comments on spiritual worldliness, the pope drew heavily from the reflections of 20th-century theologian and cardinal Henri de Lubac, who wrote that the invasion of spiritual worldliness into the life of the Church would be “infinitely more disastrous than any simple moral worldliness” because spiritual worldliness “corrupts [the Church] by undermining her very principle.”
Pope Francis wrote that spiritual worldliness begins to take hold in the lives of priests not only through temptations to mediocrity, power and influence, and vainglory but also “from doctrinal intransigence and liturgical aestheticism,” which have the appearance of religiosity and even loving the Church but instead seek human glory and personal well-being.