In 2016, when President Xi Jinping delivered a speech calling for the “Sinicization of religion” in a nation of one billion, he was espousing a century-old impulse among his people while also inadvertently underscoring a persistent paradox that Chinese Communists brought with them when they took over the country in 1949 – and have never shaken.
The impulse is that the major faiths observed in China are not indigenous to the world’s oldest civilization. Buddhism was imported from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in overland trading routes and human migration from the Middle East, while Christianity, another Abrahamic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and America. To Communist leaders, and many Han Chinese civilians, these traditions represent potentially destabilizing foreign influence.
The paradox, of course, is that Marxism was also a foreign import, one imposed on Chinese society – in Mao Zedong’s own words – from “the barrel of a gun.” It not only destabilized China’s existing social structures and spiritual traditions, but as Marxist-Leninism morphed into Maoism, also became a kind of national religion itself – with Mao Zedong in the role of savior.
This was not an accident. “Worshiping Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin is correct,” Mao said at a 1958 party conference, “because truth is in their hands.” In 1970, the “Great Helmsman” told Edgar Snow, an American journalist and Mao apologist, that the cult of personality was necessary strategy to “overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshipping tradition.”
But the ascendant faith in China when Mao and his troops embarked on “The Long March” that would put them in power wasn’t found in China’s ancient temples. It came from the Christian Bible, which was embraced by the western-educated modernists who’d helped overthrow the Qing dynasty in the early years of the 20th century.

A new survey from the U.S. Bishops’ Conference and George town University shows that the number of permanent deacons in active ministry in the U.S. last year is the lowest since 2011, which “is [a trend] in keeping with the slow decline of the diaconate over the past several years.”
The survey, “A Portrait of the Permanent Diaconate in 2022,” found that there are an estimated 13,695 permanent deacons in active ministry. The figure is about 1,000 less than the average number of permanent deacons in active ministry since 2011 – about 14, 635.
Commenting on the survey, Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing, chair of the USCCB Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life, and Vocations, highlighted the imp-ortance of permanent deacons to the church in a recent statement. He did not respond to a Crux re-quest for comment on the survey.
“Permanent deacons are essential to the Church’s ministry of love and service, especially to the poor and vulnerable,” Boyea said in the statement. “By virtue of their ordination, they give witness to Christ the Servant in the daily exercise of their work and ministry.”
The survey was published by the USCCB Committee on Cler-gy, Consecrated Life, and Voca-tions, in concert the Center for Applied Research in the Aposto-late (CARA) at Georgetown University. The same survey has been conducted on an annual basis since 2005, aside from a few years in between.

A new television channel has been launched in Iraq as an initiative to save Syriac, a language spoken for more than 2,000 years which was once the most common in Christian liturgies.
An ancient dialect of Aramaic, Syriac has traditionally been the language spoken by Christians in Iraq and neighbouring Syria. The goal of the new station Al-Syriania is “to preserve the Syriac language” according to its director Jack Anwia.
“Once, Syriac was a language widespread across the Middle East,” he said last week, adding that Baghdad has a duty “to keep it from extinction”. He added that “the beauty of Iraq is its cultural and religious diversity”.
Iraq’s government launched the channel in April with around 40 staff and a variety of programming, from cinema to art and history.
“It’s true that we speak Syriac at home, but unfortunately I feel that our language is disappearing slowly but surely,” said Mariam Albert, a news presenter on Al-Syriania.
“It is important to have a television station that represents us,” she added.
Syriac-speaking communities in both Iraq and Syria have declined over the years, owing to decades of conflict driving minorities to migrate. Today, Iraq is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim but also home to Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, with Arabic and Kurdish are the official languages.

Pope Francis’s medical team reported June 9 morning that two days after undergoing surgery for an abdominal hernia, the pontiff is continually improving and spent the morning reading following a lengthy rest the day before.
A June 9 statement from the Vatican said that Pope Francis “rested well during the night,” and that his medical team says his clinical status “is progressively improving and the post-operative course is regular.”
Francis breakfasted and got out of bed after, spending most of the day in an armchair in his room, allowing him “to read the newspapers” and to begin “the initial resumption of his work.”
Pope Francis underwent abdominal surgery Wednesday afternoon for what the Vatican described as “a lacerated incisional hernia” causing recurrent pain “and worsening sub-occlusive syndromes,” meaning there is a hernia in the abdominal wall at the place of a previous surgical incision in which the intestine goes out and comes in, creating discomfort.
The pope spent Thursday resting, and maintained a liquid diet, apart from receiving communion for the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi, which commemorates Jesus’s death on the Cross.
He also voiced gratitude for the many well-wishes and messages of support that have come in from around the world.
A Vatican statement Thursday evening said Francis was particularly moved by a message he received from the family of infant Miguel Angel, who was baptized by the pontiff on March 31, while Francis was admitted to the Gemelli hospital for bronchitis.

The bodies of Nigerians kill-ed in a May 15-16 terror attack are piled in a mass grave, and will soon be buried.
The killings come amid years of violence in northern and central Nigeria, perpetrated by Muslim Fulani herding com-munities and Islamist terrorist groups, the victims are mostly Christian farming villages in the agricultural Middle Belt of north-central Nigeria.
In a statement after the May 16 attack, Solomon Maren, a lawmaker in Nigeria’s National Assem-bly, explained that most of those who died in the violence this week were women and children.
Maren urged Nigeria’s federal government to take seriously requests for increased security in the region.
“I urge the president to order the security agencies to move into the area with immediate effect to curb the killings, as well as for the National Emergency Management Authority and other well-spirited organizations to also move in with relief materials for the wounded and survivors of the dastardly act,” he said Tuesday.
Patrick Toholde, a regional councilor in the local Mangu government, told Nigerian media that before his constituents were attacked, “locals were going about with their normal busi-nesses until yesterday morning.”
On May 16th morning, he said, “they saw an influx of Fulani herdsmen from neighboring villages moving their cattle and belongings, then the resident Fulanis followed suit.” The Fulani herders “went and camped between Washna and Kombili villages before launching the attack” on nine different commu-nities, Tohold explained.
Government officials have said it is not clear what prompted the recent attacks, but Toholde explained that the violence was “deliberate, as it was well coordinated and executed despite security presence.”

Today, Public Religion Re-search Institute (PRRI) released a new survey report finding that church attendance and the im-portance of religion continue to decline among most Americans. “Religion and Congregations in a Time of Social and Political Upheaval,” details the findings of a national survey examining the health of American religious congregations in the wake of seismic social and political shifts, including the COVID-19 pan-demic, nationwide protests for racial justice, the 2020 election and January 6 insurrection, and ongoing legislative battles over reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Today, fewer than 2 in 10 Americans (16%) say religion is the most important thing in their lives; notably that number more than doubles for white evangeli-cal Protestants (42%) and Black Protestants (38%). Nearly 1 in 3 Americans overall (29%) say religion is not important, a 10% increase from a decade ago.
Current attendance at religi-ous services is lower than report-ed in 2019 before COVID-19, with the number of Americans who attend once a week decreas-ing from 19% to 16%. Between 2019-2022, attendance at least a few times a year dropped to half or less for white Catholics (73% to 45%) and Hispanic Catholics (65% to 47%). While more than 6 out of 10 white evangelical Protestants, Protestants of color, and Latter-day Saints remain regular churchgoers, their atten-dance also experienced slight declines since 2019. Attendance had dropped below 50% prior to 2019 for white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants and non-Christian religions, and attend-ance for those groups experienced further declines over the past three years.
Yet among the faithful, Chri-stian churchgoers are satisfied with their current congregations; more than 8 in 10 churchgoers (82%) say they are optimistic about the future of their church.  This optimism spans across Christian denominations. Nearly 9 in 10 Christians who attend church services at least a few times a year (89%) are proud to say that they are associated with their church.
While the political landscape has become increasingly polari-zed, and 4 in 10 churchgoers report that hot-button political and social issues like abortion and racism are discussed in their churches, fewer than 2 in 10 churchgoers (13%) say that their church is more politically divided than it was five years ago. Only a slightly higher amount (18%) wants their church to address political divisions in America.

Italo-American director Martin Scorsese told the Jesuits’ international magazine in Rome on May 27 that he had decided to answer Pope Francis’s recent call to show Jesus to the cinema-going public. “I’ve responded to the appeal which the pope made to artists in the only way I know how: imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus, and I’m set to start making it,” said the 80-year-old Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas dir-ector, who made the controver-sial Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. Speaking as a guest of twice-monthly Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattollica, Scorsese, who has Sicilian-born grandpa-rents on both sides, told editor-in-chief Father Antonio Spadaro: “I’ve answered the pope’s call to make us see Jesus,” The great director, who won an Oscar for The Departed in 2006, spoke freely about his life and work for a major interview with the Jesuit organ.

The bishop of Antwerp, Belgium, said that because Pope Francis has not voiced his opposition specifically to the Flemish bishops’ decision to bless same-sex unions, he has taken that as tacit approval for their action.
Bishop Johan Bonny said in a May 17 interview with Katholi-sch.de that he had had “two conversations” with Francis from which he inferred he knew that he and his brother bishops were “not going against the Pope.”
The Flemish ordinary said he was not allowed to share the precise contents of those conversations, but stressed that knowing the Pope’s stance was “very important for me and for the other bishops in Flanders.”
Bishop Bonny and the other Flemish bishops of Belgium introduced a blessing for same-sex couples in September 2022, pu-blishing a handout containing a suggested liturgy and prayers and basing their argument on Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation on the 2014-2015 Synod on the Family, Amoris Laetitia.

Two German dioceses are forging ahead with lay participation in Church governance, despite warnings from the Vatican.
The dioceses have begun to put reforms proposed by the German synodal path initiative into practice, especially that of involving the laity in governance.
In the Diocese of Osnabrück, which has been vacant since the Pope accepted Bishop Franz-Josef Bode’s resignation in March, talks have begun between the nine priest members of the cathedral chapter and nine lay Catholics.
The Osnabrück diocese has thereby adopted a model developed by the neighbouring Archdiocese of Paderborn. The diocesan Catholic Council, or “Katholikenrat”, which represents lay Catholics in the diocese, selected nine lay members keeping strictly to a generation- and gender-equitable method.
This 18-member group will now discuss the profile of the future bishop and exchange opinions on possible named persons. These talks will continue until the summer holidays and are strictly confidential.
On the basis of the talks the cathedral chapter will then draw up a list of  names which the cathedral chapter will then send to the Vatican via the apostolic nuncio in Berlin, Archbishop Nikola Eterovic.
The Vatican will then choose three names – the so-called terna – from the list and the Osnabrück chapter alone and not the nine members of the laity, will choose one of them as future bishop.

The archbishop of one of the world’s most dangerous dioceses has described how he has to have five guard dogs to protect him at home, and travels around with an armed escort. Archbishop Matthew Ndagoso of Kaduna in northern Nigeria gave Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) a glimpse into life in his diocese in northern Nigeria.
He said that eight of his priests had been kidnapped in just three years – three were killed, one is still missing and the others were freed. He added that one of the murdered priests in particular had shown tremendous courage.
The archbishop said: “While they were pointing an AK-47 at him, he told his attackers that they should repent of their evil, so they killed him.”
Life is increasingly dangerous for Christians in many parts of Nigeria, as highlighted in ACN’s 2022 edition of Persecuted and Forgotten?