An architect of Germany’s “synodal way” has explained how organizers used tactics employed successfully in politics to build pressure for change in the Catholic Church.
Thomas Sternberg said in a Dec. 2 interview that issues such as married clergy, women priests, and homosexuality were “opened up” by the initiative and were now being “discussed internationally, not only in Germany.”
Sternberg was co-president of the synodal way when it was officially launched on Dec. 1, 2019, until he stood down as president of the influential Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) in 2021.
He told the Cologne-based Catholic news website Domradio.de that the multi-year process — which brings together Germany’s bishops and select lay people to discuss power, the priesthood, women in the Church, and sexuality — was “running much more successfully” than he had first imagined.
He noted that Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, had “want-ed to stop the whole thing” three years ago.
“What is now happening here in Germany is a non-binding discussion process from the per-spective of canon law.”

The Catholic population in the United States has grown by about 2 million people in 10 years. With nearly 62 million people, it continues to constitute the largest religious body in 36 U.S. states, according to the latest religion-focused survey of America’s religious congregations.
Over the last decade, many Catholics, the survey found, have moved to the South.
“Perhaps the most notable changes were by region,” Clifford Grammich, a political scientist involved in the U.S. Religion Census, told CNA Dec. 5. “Fifty years ago, 71% of U.S. Catholics were in the Northeast and Midwest; in 2020, 45% were. And the South now has more Catholics than any other region. I was surprised to see there are now more Catholics than Southern Baptists in Missouri and Virginia.”
The U.S. Religion Census is conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies every 10 years. Its latest report was released last month.
Its 2020 survey reported that there were 61.9 million Catholics in the U.S., about 18.7% of the population. The survey identified 372 religious bodies with more than 356,000 congregations and 161.4 million adherents in the United States.

Support for Americans’ right to practice the religion of their choice rose dramatically this year, a new study by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty found.
Becket’s “2022 Religious Freedom Index,” released Dec. 7, showed a substantial increase in support for “religious pluralism” — the ability to choose and practice one’s religion without fear of persecution.
“Support for the right to choose and practice the religion of your choice has never been higher,” Becket’s index reports.
Becket’s index published the results of a 21-question online survey taken by Heart+Strategies this fall. The survey polled a nationally representative sample of 1,004 American adults.
Only 3% of Americans could correctly identify all five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (speech, religion, assembly, press, petition).
Americans’ opinion on religious people is at an all-time low, with a 50-50 split in viewing them as part of the problem versus part of the solution.
The U.S. government’s treatment of religious communities contributed to a decrease in trust in the government among 26% of those surveyed, while it increased trust in the government in 9%.
59% of Americans believe the government should not force employers or medical workers to pay for or provide abortions again-st their consciences. Meanwhile, 41% of Americans believe the opposite.
54% of respondents believed that the government should not force businesses or medical workers to pay for or provide sex-change procedures, while 46% believed the opposite.

It is no secret that Pope Francis has been ruffling feathers on the global stage in recent weeks. He has angered Russia, Ukraine and China over his comments in the last month alone. So when the Vatican’s official website went dark on Wednesday, it was hard to determine just which of the pope’s enemies might be behind it.
While the Vatican spokes-person initially said the site was undergoing maintenance and technical difficulties, he finally admitted that the Holy See had been hacked. “Technical investigations are ongoing due to abnormal attempts to access the site,” Matteo Bruni said in a statement late Wednesday.
But those “abnormal attempts” could be a warning of more to come. The prime suspect is Russia, which has a history of conducting cyber warfare against enemies of its state. The holy hack came just 24 hours after Francis angered the Kremlin by singling out Chechens and Buryati troops within the military contingent invading Ukraine, leading to accusations of ”race baiting” against the pontiff.
Ukraine Angry After Pope Francis Calls Darya Dugina ‘Innocent’ War Victim.

The interview was held on November 22 at his Vatican residence at Santa Marta and was conducted in Spanish by five represen-tatives of the American Jesuit magazine including its outgoing editor in chief, Fr. Matt Malone, S.J., and Fr. Sam Sawyer, S.J., the incoming editor in chief. Questions ranged from polarization in the U.S. Church, racism, Church teaching on the ordination of women, the Pope’s stance on social issues, the war in Ukraine, the Vatican’s relations with China and his pontificate.
“I am happy because I feel God at my side.”
Fr. Malone introduced the interview by asking Pope Francis what makes him so peaceful and happy in his ministry. The Pope answered that being with people has always given him great joy, and that what makes him feel happy is having the assurance that “God is at his side.” “Throughout my life – he said – He has always guided me on His path, sometimes in difficult moments, but there is always the assurance that one does not walk alone.”
The Holy Father warned against the dangers of ideological partisanship in society, but especially within the Church, noting that U.S. society too has some “ideological Catho-lic groups.” “Polarization is not Catholic,” he stressed. “A Catholic cannot think either-or (aut-aut) and reduce everything to polari-zation. The essence of what is Catholic is both-and (et-et).” He recalled that Jesus went beyond the divisions among the Jews of the time between the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots. proposing the Beatitudes, “which are also something di-fferent.”
“The more polarization there is, the more one loses the Catholic spirit and falls into a sectarian spirit.”

The number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood in England and Wales has fallen for the third year in a row, according to new figures released this week.
The statistics, published by the National Office for Vocation, showed a total of 21 ordinations in 2021 for the 22 Catholic dioceses in England and Wales, as well as the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
In comparison, there were 35 ordinations in 2018, 32 in 2019, and 27 in 2020.
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An estimated 3.8 million adults in England and Wales identify as Catholic, while an autumn 2021 count found that 370,000 Catholics regularly attend Mass.
The number of ordinations in England and Wales has fluctuated considerably throughout the early 21st century, reaching a high of 44 in 2001 and a low of 15 in 2008.

The Church in Belgium has reported a sharp rise in the number of people asking for their names to be removed from baptismal registers. The Catholic Church in Belgium reported on a sharp rise in the number of people asking for their names to be removed from baptismal registers.
The Church’s latest annual report, published on Nov. 30, said there were 5,237 such requests in 2021, compared to 1,261 in 2020 and 1,800 in 2019.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark of his belonging to Christ.” While a person can lapse in the practice of the faith, or even renounce it altogether, it is impossible to reverse the effects of baptism.
Nevertheless, a rising move-ment in Europe promoting “deba-ptism” has encouraged Catholics to write to Church authorities asking to be removed from parish baptismal records. The movement is a consortium of several political and philosophical factions among European secularists.

A pioneering institute to investigate the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has been launched in the United Kingdom.
The Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution is the brainchild of Dr. Martin Par-sons, a former aid worker to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He served in those two countries both under the Taliban and after the Taliban had been evicted from power.
The first of its kind, the center aims to generate research focused on countries like Nigeria, where Christians are currently being subjected to crimes against huma-nity and are at risk of genocide.
“The Lindisfarne Centre aims not just to describe what is ha-ppening but also to explain why it is happening, as well as seeking to predict where it is likely to spread to,” Dr. Parsons, a world-renowned expert on Islam and the persecution of Christians, told Church Militant.
“It is quite extraordinary that respected major human rights organizations and even the United Nations will simply ignore the persecution of Christians – pre-ferring to focus on other minority groups,” Parsons, who has a doct-orate in Islamic studies, explain-ed.
“It is urgent that the perse-cution of Christians, particularly in the Islamic world, is put back on the agenda of international bodies, governments and NGOs,” he emphasized.
“We are seeking to produce research that is both academically valid and accessible but without being merely anecdotal. We want to produce something that is sufficiently credible to be acce-pted as evidence in court cases involving persecuted Christians,” Parsons added.

In Nigeria, you can be put to death under the law for the “cri-me” of blasphemy. Sufi musici-an Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, current-ly imprisoned for blasphemy, has petitioned the Nigerian Supreme Court to put an end to his criminal case, which centres on his sharing religious lyrics on the popular messaging platform WhatsApp. For exerci-sing his fundamental rights to free expression and reli-gious freedom, Yahaya’s life is on the line. This potentially land-mark case could abolish once and for all Northern Nigeria’s Sharia blasphemy law — an urgently needed step for the peaceful co-existence of faiths in the country.
In March 2020 Yahaya shared song lyrics via WhatsApp that others viewed as insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. His house was burned to the ground by a mob, and he was promptly arrest-ed and charged with blasphemy under the Sharia Penal Code of Kano State. Without legal repre-sentation, he was tried, convict-ed and sentenced to death by hanging by a local Sharia judge.
Nobody should be punished, much less killed, for their religi-ous ideas. Any person of faith or no faith at all can be sanctioned, and even killed, as a result of a blasphemy accusation. In a country of over 200 million, split nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims, everyone stands to lose under these laws. Their abolishment would dramatically improve the prospects for human rights in Nigeria.

Pope Francis enthusiastically greeted Italian actor and come-dian Roberto Benigni at the Va-tican on Wednesday morning.
Benigni, best known for his Oscar-winning film “Life is Beautiful,” met privately with the pope to tell him about his latest project, a new show about St. Francis of Assisi.
The comic, who recited a line from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy from memory on the Oscars stage in 1999, now serves as the host of the Italian program based on St. Francis’ poem “The Canticle of the Sun.”
The show, “Francesco Il Cantico,” is currently streaming on Paramount Plus in Italy. Benigni also gave the pope a copy of the program on DVD, accor-ding to Reuters.
Pope Francis meeting with Roberto Benigni, Dec. 7, 2022. Vatican Media.
Greeting the pope with a hug, Benigni joked that the pontiff was “emanating light.”
Pope Francis told him not to exaggerate, to which the actor replied: “I have to exaggerate, I’m happy to be here.”