Pope Francis has addressed a wide variety of topics – from the death of Benedict XVI, criticism of Fracncis’ papacy, homosexuality, relations with China, the case of Father Rupnik, and even his “good” health despite his age – in an interview released today by the Associated Press, an American news agency. It is the pontiff’s first interview since the death, on 31 December 2022, of his predecessor Joseph Ratzinger, whose character Pope Francis outlines in his interview with correspondent Nicole Winfield, which took place on Tuesday at Casa Santa Marta.
The Pope described Benedict XVI as “a gentleman” and said that with his death “I lost a father”: “For me, he was a security. When faced with doubt, I would call for the car, go to the monastery and ask [him about it].” Asked once again asked about the possibility of resignation, the Pope said that if he ever renounced the Petrine ministry, he would use the title “bishop emeritus of Rome” and live in the Casa del Clero (a residence for clergy) in Rome.” “Benedict’s experience,” he added, already gives future popes greater freedom to choose to resign.

Although numbers haven’t changed sub-stantially from the previous year, 2022 was the worst year for Christians worldwide, due to an intensifying level of violence discrimi-nation and exclusion, according to the late-st World Watch List released by Open Doors, a watchdog group that advocates for Christians.
The report, which was presented on Wednesday at the Italian Parliament in Rome, ranks the fifty countries where Christians face the worst persecution.
According to the data reported, more than 360 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith. Similar numbers were recorded last year. However, the score of the indicators in the fifty countries at risk is growing.
In the previous report, the Pyongyang had been replaced by Afghanistan, following the Talebani takeover in August  2021. The latter’s ranking has dropped to the ninth  place, not because of any improvement, but for the simple reason that most Christians present there have fled the country. Conversion from Islam to another faith is punished with death in Afghanistan. The tiny local Christian community is,  therefore, forced to live in clandestinity.
North Korea is followed by Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Lybia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Iran,  all of  which are facing either war or internal strife,  or are under authoritarian regimes, as in the case of Eritrea and Iran..
In terms of absolute numbers Christians killed in 2022 have slightly decreased from 5,621 to 5,898.  Also, the number of churches attacked or closed decreased by more than half from over five thousand in 2021 to just over two thousand last year. China has played major role in this cutback, with one thousand incidents against three thousand in the previous year.
On the other hand, however, 2022 has seen a drastic increase in abductions of Christians, from 3,829 to 5,259. Almost five thousand are concentrated in three countries: Nigeria, Mo-zambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where in recent days Islamists have claimed a bomb attack against a Pentecostal church in the eastern Congolese town of Ka-sindi, which killed 14 people and injured 39.

Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.
As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.
About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research. It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.
Protestant pastors reported that typical church attendance is only 85% of pre-pandemic levels, McConnell said, while research by the Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that in spring 2022 67% of Americans reported attending church at least once a year, compared with 75% before the pandemic.

The wonders we see in the universe “should draw us out of ourselves,” an Ivy League scientist said last week, “looking out not just towards the wonders themselves and towards the truths they reveal, but also towards the source of all truths and the ultimate Creator of all things.”
Karin Öberg, professor of astronomy and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, said her work as a scientist has helped her to appreciate that we live in a universe that “has a beginning, a middle, and an end that’s unfolding over time.”
She also said that belief in God, far from being an impediment to scientific inquiry, actually can be helpful for scientists because of the “sure foundation” that belief in a Creator provides. Öberg herself is a convert from atheism.
“I think we should feel quite confident that having a true philosophy, and a true religion, should make it easier to make scientific discoveries, and not the opposite,” Öberg said in a Jan. 13 speech.
Karin Öberg delivers a keynote address at the Wonder Conference on Jan. 13, 2023. Credit: Word on Fire/Screenshot
Öberg delivered the second keynote address Jan. 13 at the Wonder Conference, organized by the Catholic media apostolate Word on Fire, which took place in Grapevine, Texas, and attracted about 1,000 participants.
Öberg, a Swedish-born scientist who serves on the board of the international Society of Catholic Scientists, primarily studies the formation of stars and planets. The “empty” space between stars — what’s known as the “interstellar medium” — is not actually empty at all but contains vast quantities of gas and dust. Over millions of years, interstellar clouds can start to collapse in on themselves, and that is how stars form, Öberg said.
Many scientists today and in the past have been guided in their scientific inquiry by their faith, Öberg said.

An exiled priest, Father Erick Díaz, and a human rights defender, attorney Yader Morazán, have charged that the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua is manipulating and “fabricating” witnesses for the trial that it is preparing against the bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez.
Díaz, who lives in exile in the United States after leaving his country in September 2022, said on Facebook that the regime “has fabricated” a list of witnesses “to testify against Bishop Rolando.”
The prelate has been a critic of the abuses of the Ortega dictatorship. Beginning Aug. 4, 2022, the Nicaraguan police surrounded the chancery when he and a group of priests, seminarians, and a layman were inside and forcibly confined them for two weeks, until around 3 a.m. on Aug. 19, when they broke into the building and hauled everyone away.
All were taken to the capital of Managua, where the bishop is being held under house arrest, and the others are incarcerated in “El Chipote” prison, notorious for torturing political prisoners.
At a Jan. 10 hearing, amid complaints of irregularities in the proceedings, the court hearing his case determined that Álvarez, accused of “conspiracy” and spreading “fake news” against the regime, will be brought to trial.

On Jan 22, 2023 Pope Francis celebrated a special Mass mark-ing the Day of the Word of God, during which he conferred the ministry of lector on seven lay people, five of them women, and said the Gospel is intended primarily for the sick and far away.
Francis formally opened the ministry of lector, along with that of acolyte, to women in a 2021 decree. He established the Day of the Word of God on the third Sunday in ordinary time in 2019.
In his homily for the Jan. 22 Mass, the pope noted that Jesus in the scriptures is “always on the move, on his way to others.”
“On no occasion in his public life does he give us the idea that he is a stationary teacher, a professor seated on a chair; on the contrary, we see him as an itinerant and a pilgrim, travelling through towns and villages, encountering faces and their stories,” he said.
In the Gospels, Jesus uses the Word of God to heal and lift people out of darkness, Francis said, insisting that the Word of God is not only destined “for the right-eous of Israel, but for all.”
Jesus, he said, wants to reach “those far away, he wants to heal the sick, he wants to save sinners, he wants to gather the lost sheep and lift up those whose hearts are weary and oppressed. Jesus ‘reaches out’ to tell us that God’s mercy is for everyone.”

On, January 23 the president of the German Bishops’ Conference said he welcomed a new letter from the Vatican detailing concerns about the push for a permanent synodal council — a new controlling body of the Church in Germany.
In a statement published on January 23, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg said the German diocesan bishops had discussed the letter and would seek to discuss the matter further “in the near future.”
At the same time, Bätzing dismissed concerns that a German synodal council would have authority over the bishops’ conference and undermine the authority of individual bishops as “unfounded.”
As CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-lang-uage news partner, reported, these concerns were addressed in the latest letter from the Vatican because five German bishops asked Rome to do so.
The bishops of Cologne, Regensburg, Passau, Eichstätt, and Augsburg wrote to the Vatican on Dec. 21, 2022. They raised what Bätzing acknowledged on Monday were “justified and necessary questions” — in parti-cular, whether bishops could be compelled to abide by such a council’s authority.
This was not the case, the Vatican’s latest letter noted. The message, written in German, reminded Bishop Bätzing that according to Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council teaches “that episcopal consecration, together with the office of sanctifying, also confers the office of teaching and of governing, which, however, of its very nature, can be exercised only in hierarchical communion with the head and the members of the college.”
Running to four pages, the latest Vatican letter to Germany said it was approved by Pope Francis. It was signed by the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin; the prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Luis Ladaria; and the prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet.
Warning of a threat of a new schism from Germany, the Vatican already intervened in July 2022 against a German synodal council.
The latest missive, dated January 16, informed Bätzing “that neither the Synodal Way, nor any body established by it, nor any bishops’ conference has the competence to establish the ‘synodal council’ at the national, diocesan, or parish level.”

Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, 90, may have had to wait almost three years but he finally gained a private audience with Pope Francis, the day after the Jan. 5 funeral for retired Pope Benedict XVI.
“It was wonderful. He was so very warm,” Zen told Jesuit magazine America after the audience.
Zen said he thanked Francis for giving Hong Kong “a good bishop,” by appointing Jesuit Father Stephen Chow in 2021 over the top of other more conservative, pro-China candidates. He said Francis quipped, “He’s a Jesuit!”
He also told the pope about his decade-long pastoral ministry visiting prisoners in Hong Kong’s jails and that he had baptized a number of prisoners when they requested the sacrament.
“Benedict’s death served to open recent wounds over the deal”
Cardinal Zen had previously travelled to Rome in 2020, seeking an audience with Pope Francis after sending him a letter concerning the Vatican’s controversial deal with the Chinese Communist Party regarding the appointment of bishops but did not manage to see him. Pope Benedict’s death served to open recent wounds over the deal.

Days before Christmas, Chri-stians in Nigeria buried 40 people killed in terror attacks in the nor-thern Nigerian state of Kaduna, where several villages have been attacked this month by suspected terrorists from the Fulani tribe of northern Nigeria.
At a Dec. 22 inter-denomi-national memorial service, mour-ners were encouraged to take de-fensive measures against a years-long spate of terrorism and viole-nce in the largely Christian farm-ing communities of northern and central Nigeria – especially as government security officials have been criticized for failing to pre-vent terrorist attacks.
At the open-air prayer service ceremony, Fr. Benjamin Bala ex-horted Nigerians to “be ready in … ‘Holy anger,’ to respond to the natural sense for self-preservation which is also both divine and con-stitutional.”
“This requires us to do all within the law and our faith to and protect our lives. In Genesis 9:5, God says he will demand an account of every life; beast and man from us. Yes, God is our refuge and protector. But we must cooperate with him at all times to keep us safe and secure,” the priest said.
“These are indeed trying times for us. We cannot afford to be asleep. We must keep awake. We must not allow ourselves to give in to the antics of our atta-ckers. Let us not allow them to push us into doing things that are unlawful and acting against our Christian faith. Our faith teaches us to constantly pray and watch.”
The 40 victims include 33 men and boys, and 7 women and girls of several Christian traditions: 22 Catholics, 16 Evangelicals, and 2 Baptists.
The youngest victim of the terror attacks was two years old. The oldest was 65. Among the dead were 6 members of one family – father, mother and four children.
The victims were part of Malagum 1 and Sakong village communities in the southern part of the Kaduna state.

The COVID-19 pandemic touched nearly every aspect of American life. Schools, offices, grocery stores, and churches faced daunting challenges in the early days of the pandemic in their efforts to operate while keeping their employees, members, and the broader community safe. For churches and religious organizations, concerns over COVID-19 led many to pause traditional in-person worship services. A recent Pew Research Centre study found that nearly one in three churches or religious organizations were completely closed in summer 2020, while others moved outside or online. By March 2022, most were offering some type of regular service, but only 43% of religious Americans reported that services currently being offered by their place of worship were back to their pre-pandemic operations.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted religious participation for millions of Americans. In summer 2020, only 13% of Americans reported attending in-person worship services. This rebounded to 27% by March 2022, but rates of worship attendance were still lower than they were before the pandemic. However, the pandemic did not appear to affect one’s faith, with most adults reporting that their religious affiliation today was no different than it was pre-pandemic. In fact, one study showed that the experience of the pandemic may have even strengthened many Americans’ religious faith.