Members of a Protestant House Church in northern China, forcibly shut down last year, launched a prayer campaign for the well-being of detained pastors, leaders, and their family members amid a government crackdown, says a report.
Five prayer requests were sent to the members as the authorities in the Yadou district of Shanxi province have continued an investigation into the Linfen Covenant House Church, China Aid reported on Feb. 7.
Linfen Church and a church-run school were shut down last November, citing unauthorized religious and educational activities, according to Bitter Winter magazine.
Last August, police arrested the church’s preachers — Li Jie and Han Xiaodong — and placed them under house arrest. Later, following interrogations of church members, police arrested Wang Qiang, a leader and co-worker of the church.
The three arrested were charged with “fraud” allegedly based on testimonies of church members that they “defrauded” congregants through tithings and offerings.
Linfen Covenant House Church is a sister church of Zion Reformed Church in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, which was raided last November.
The police reportedly disrupted the Sunday liturgy and arrested seven Christians for attending an “illegal gathering” by violating Covid-19 pandemic rules.

“Now it is even more important to be close to the people, who are terrorized by this earth-quake.” For Jesuit Antoine Audo, Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, “among the many we have had, this is a disaster that, so to speak, we are not used to. After 12 years of war, this is a new tremendous bomb, lethal and unknown, which falls on us.”
The earthquake that shook southern Turkey and north-central Syria at 4:17 a.m. local time on Monday, February 6, is the most violent in eight centuries. This was reported by Marlène Brax, director of the Lebanese Geophysics Center, interviewed by the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour. The earthquake had a magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale, with epicenter located in southern Turkey.
The Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo describes to Fides “a city of two and a half million inhabitants without electricity, water and heating. It is very cold, winter is harsh. I see people in the streets or in cars. They are afraid, they do not know what will happen, because it may not be over, and there are rumours that new strong and devastating tremors may follow.” In fact, A new 7.6 magnitude earthquake tremor was recorded in the southern Turkish province of Kahramanmaras at 1:24 p.m. local time, and was also felt in Damascus.
In Syria, the provisional death toll reported by official Syrian sources, which is unfortunately set to rise, speaks so far of 371 people killed and more than 1,000 injured as a result of the quake. Hundreds more victims are already being counted in Syrian areas outside the control of the government of Damascus. Churches in the area are also beginning to come to terms with the devastation suffered as a result of the earthquake. In Turkey, Bishop Paolo Bizzeti, Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, reported that Iskenderun Cathedral has collapsed, and churches of the Syrian Orthodox and Orthodox communities in that city have also been destroyed. “Here in Aleppo”, Bishop Audo reports to Fides, “Melkite Archbishop Georges Masri has been pulled alive from the rubble, but his Vicar is still under the destroyed building, and they still have not found him.”

The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church announced Feb. 6 that that the world’s largest Eastern Catholic Church will change liturgical calendars this fall, changing the date of several liturgical feasts, as Ukrainian Christian distance themselves from the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The move means that Ukrainian Catholics will begin this year celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25, but will for now continue to celebrate Easter on a later date than most of the world’s Catholics and Protestant Christians.
Read more reporting from The Pillar:
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk announced Monday that the Ukrainian Catholic Church will mostly discontinue using the Julian calendar, a liturgical calendar used almost exclusively by the Russian Orthodox Church and other eastern churches influenced by it.
Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, announced that the change had called for during a Feb. 1-2 synodal meeting of the Church’s bishops. In the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the synod of bishops is a policy-setting body, which governs the Church in line with the major archbishop and the pope.
For a large part of Ukrainian society, the Julian calendar is perceived as a marker of the “Russkiy mir,” or “Russian world,” ideology, which has been used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify his invasion in Ukraine.
In polling conducted by Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture last year, 60% of Ukrainians said the country’s churches should move away from the Russian-influenced liturgical schedule.
In a resolution passed last week, the bishops of the UGCC explained that Catholics had asked for a change, and that they had consulted with clergy and monasteries about the move.
The bishops decided that a changeover will happen September 1, but have allowed for parishes to transition more slowly, taking even until 2025, with permission from their diocesan bishops.

Muslim leaders in England are rebuking the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, over the Church of England’s proposal to teach school children that same-sex unions are valid.
The admonition coincides with Pope Francis’ trip to South Sudan. He was accompanied by the archbishop of Canterbury and the moderator of the Church of Scotland — both pro-LGBT leaders whose denominations offer “same-sex blessings” and “same-sex marriage” in several countries.
On Friday, the Association of British Muslims wrote to Welby expressing its “concern about the teaching of sexual identity politics in schools, including Church of England schools.”
From summer on, “every Church of England primary school will teach that both heterosexual and homosexual marriages have equal validity,” Paul Salahuddin Armstrong, head of the ABM, noted in the letter obtained by Church Militant.
Armstrong acknowledged that British law recognized “same-sex marriage” but stressed that “many faith communities, both locally and globally, still hold to the traditional definition of marriage as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the formal union of a man and a woman, as recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife.’”

As from this year, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) will be celebrating Christmas on the 25 December, and not on January 7, and the Epiphany on 6 January instead of the 19th.
The switch of dates is part of a major change decided last week by the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC, moving away from the Julian Calendar which is presently used almost exclusively by the Russian Orthodox Church and other Eastern Churches under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow.
The governing body of the UGCC meeting in Lviv-Bryukhovychi on February 1–2, decided that the changeover will take effect on September 1, but allowed for parishes to transition gradually with permission from their respective bishops. 90 per cent of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in favour of the reform
The decision was officially announced in a live broadcast of “Live TV” on Monday, 6 February, by the head of the UGCC, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who explained that it was adopted after a vast consultation, involving clergy, religious and Church leaders, which indicated a shift of opinion in favour of the change.

Over 200 detained members of Nicara-gua’s opposition were freed on February 9 and expelled to the United States, in a surprise move by the Central American country’s increasingly authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega.
After weeks of quiet talks with Washing-ton, Nicaragua allowed the 222 detainees – which include former challengers to Ortega – to board a chartered flight to Washington.
US officials said they would allow the former prisoners to stay for at least two years and provide medical and legal support.
“I would like to thank God and everyone who made possible this miracle — the miracle of freedom,” Juan Sebastian Chamorro, who was arrested before he could challenge Orte-ga in the 2021 election, said at Dulles Inter-national Airport near the US capital.
“We are here in the land of freedom and we are very grateful,” he said.
Chamorro, whose aunt defeated Ortega in the 1990 presidential election, said that the group had no warning until they were given clothes and taken to another cell before being put on buses.
“It’s been 20 months behind bars in a maximum-security prison, totally incommu-nicado,” he said. “But here we are with our heads high.”
Ortega’s only comment on the move was to say that Catholic Bishop Rolando Alvarez, who was among the detainees, refused to join the others on the US-bound plane.
“Alvarez did not want to comply with the law, with what the state of Nicaragua man-dates,” Ortega said, adding that the bishop returned to prison. Nicaraguan prelate senten-ced to 26 years and 4 months in prison
Octavio Rothschuh, president of an appeals court in the capital Managua, described the prisoners as having been “deported” and called them “traitors to the homeland.”
Nicaragua’s legislature moved to strip the expelled dissidents of their citizenship. To become law, the proposal must be voted on again in the second half of 2023.

Whose appointment as archbishop was confirmed by Pope Francis on Jan. 7, shared the difficult times he spent being held hostage by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group and the importance of the “spirit of forgiveness.”
In a statement to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language sister news agency, Father Jacques Mourad, elected archbishop of Homs, Syria, by the Synod of Bishops of the Patriarchal Church of Antioch of the Syrians, Eastern-rite Catholics in communion with Rome, recalled that when he was kidnapped by ISIS along with a postulant from his congregation, the jihadists were trying to “convert us to Islam.”
However, despite the risk of death, he recalled in that situation how other Christians “had the courage and enthusiasm to respond in order to testify to their faith.”
Despite the danger our lives were in, he stressed, “we are disciples of Jesus crucified and risen.”
It was precisely under these conditions, he noted, that he learned “a magnificent example of forgiveness.”
“One of the jihadists condemned me to death, put a knife to my neck, and threatened me,” he said.
“I didn’t feel anger, nor hatred, nor any feeling of violence against him,” Mourad said

Around 28% of Poland’s Catholics attended Mass in 2021, according to the latest official statistics.
The new figures were said to indicate a ”dramatic fall” in church attendance in one of Europe’s most Catholic countries.
On Jan. 13, the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics (ISKK) released its 2021 “Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae in Polonia,” a yearly numerical overview of Poland’s Catholic Church.
Since 1980, the institute has reported the percentage of “dominicantes” (Sunday Mass-goers) and “communicantes” (recipients of Holy Communion) out of the total number of baptized Catholics who are able to fulfill the obligation to attend weekly Mass on a given Sunday each year.
Its latest report said that 28.3% were present at Sunday Mass when a headcount was taken on Sept. 26, 2021, while 12.9% received Communion.
This marked a notable drop compared to the last time the numbers were published in 2019 — no Sunday Mass figures were issued for the pandemic year of 2020.
In 2019, the figure for dominicantes was 36.9% and communicantes 16.7%, so the proportion of dominicantes fell by 8.6% and communicantes by 3.8% between 2019 and 2021.
The annual report breaks the statistics down by diocese. The diocese with the highest percentage of dominicantes and communicantes in 2021 is Tarnów, in southeastern Poland, with 59.1% and 21.9% respectively, while Szczecin-Kamieñ archdiocese, in northwestern Poland, recorded just 16.9% and 8.1% respectively. Tarnów is known as Poland’s ”most religious” diocese, while Szczecin-Kamieñ is considered its least religious — testifying to wide regional disparities in religious practice.
The “Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae in Polonia” also contains figures for other sacraments. The latest report says that in 2021 there were 315,357 baptisms (compared to 312,082 in 2020), 331,744 first Holy Communions (297,951 in 2020), 265,681 confirmations (252,253 in 2020), and 103,807 Catholic weddings (91,468 in 2020).
Finally, the annual report offers a statistical profile of the Polish Church. In 2021, it says, the country had 10,352 Catholic parishes, 23,984 priests incardinated in dioceses, and 1,341 diocesan seminarians. Some 82% of students attended Church-run religion classes in the 2021-22 school year.

Pope Francis did not need to launch listening sessions for the Synod of Bishops for people to discover there are tensions in the Catholic Church, said the cardinal serving as the synod’s relator general.
“We do not need the synod in the Catholic Church in order to experience tensions,” Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, relator general of the synod, told reporters at the Vatican Jan. 23. “These tensions come from the fact that each one honestly wants to see or share how we can follow Christ and proclaim Christ in the world today. That is the source of tension.”

Pope Benedict XVI has had a book of essays published posthumously in which he defends the unique character of the Mass and the Catholic priesthood and attacks rising intolerance in the increasingly atheistic West.
In the book, which is called What Christianity Is, the German pope, who died aged 95 on New Year’s Eve, warned Catholics in particular of the danger of a “radical manipulation of human beings” and “the distortion of the sexes by gender ideology”.
He wrote that although the intolerance of modernity towards the Christian faith “has not yet turned into open persecution … it manifests itself in an increasingly authoritarian way with the aim of achieving, by appropriate legislation, the eradication of what is essentially Christian”.
There are 16 essays in the book, four of which are previously unpublished. Benedict dated a preface May 1, 2022, and told Elio Guerriero, an assistant who helped him to compile the essays, that he did not wish the book to be published until his death.
“I do not want to publish anything else in my life,” Guerriero said Benedict told him, according to news reports.