In his first formal appointment in the Gulf nation of Bahrain, Pope Francis on November 3 condemned the use of the death penalty, which is still in force in the country and has been condemned by activists who argue that loved ones were un-fairly killed after being convicted in sham trials.
Speaking to civil authorities and members of the diplomatic corps in Bahrain, Pope Francis in his November 3 speech cited the country’s constitution, which bans discrimination on the basis of “sex, origin, language, religion or creed,” insisting that “freedom of conscience is absolute,” and that “the state guarantees the inviolability of worship.”
These are commitments that “need constantly to be put into practice,” he said, to ensure that “religious freedom will be complete and not limited to freedom of worship,” and that equal dignity and opportunities will be afforded to “each group and for every individual.”
Yet before all of these guarantees, he said, is “the right to life” and the need “to guarantee that right always, including for those being punished, whose lives should not be taken.”
An avid and outspoken opponent of the death penalty, Pope Francis has described the practice as an attack on “the dignity of the human person,” and asked that it be abolished worldwide.

The French bishops’ conference overhauled its agenda for its November plenary meeting to deal with “the anger, shame, po-werlessness (and) incomprehension” they and their people felt after discovering that a bishop allowed by the Vatican to retire actually was disciplined for sexual abuse.
Archbishop Eric de Moulins-Beaufort of Reims, president of the bishops’ conference, announced the changed agenda Nov. 3 and urged his fellow bishops to have as their first concern “the victims, those who spoke out two years ago and more recently, and those, perhaps, who have not yet made themselves known.”
The Archbishop was referring to the case of retired Bishop Michel Santier of Créteil. When the Vatican announced in 2021 that the bishop was retiring, the bishop had said it was for health reasons. No one contradicted him publicly until mid-October, when the Diocese of Créteil confirmed he had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and disciplin-ed by the Vatican.
The bishops, who were meeting in Lourdes, acknowledged the sense of betrayal felt by people in the Diocese of Créteil, the archbishop said, as well as “the anger, shame, discouragement and weariness of the most committed faithful, deacons, priests, seminarians.” Those feelings, he said, are “reaching a new level, no doubt unbearable for some.”
“All of us are shaken, personally and in our apostolic authority in the service of the Lord Jesus and the people of God, by suffering a collective criticism for a matter that most of us have had nothing to do with,” he said.

Germany’s controversial church tax should be reformed, not abolished, according to Munich archdiocese’s finance director.
Writing in the magazine Stimmen der Zeit, Markus Reif argued that Church members, including those with looser affiliations, should be given more say in how the revenue generated by the tax is spent.
Catholics in Germany are obliged to pay the Kirchensteuer, or church tax, which amounts to an additional 8-9% of their income tax, depending on where they live. The only way for German Catholics to stop paying the state-administered tax is to formally declare that they are no longer Church members, after which they are sometimes denied the sacraments.
Church tax revenues are mainly spent on parishes, for example, on the salaries of sacristans, janitors, and musicians. They also fund the Church’s large central bureaucracy and bodies such as the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), the powerful lay group driving the country’s contentious “synodal way,” as well as social and pastoral projects in the developing world.
Analysts believe that the current dynamic of rising church tax revenue and falling numbers of German Catholics is temporary, and that the exodus of Catholics will eventually lead to a sharp drop in Church income. In a 2,300-word essay entitled “Church tax: The most important source of income for the Church in Germany,” Reif noted that the debate about church tax was not new but was “gaining in intensity again.”

Pope Francis met with Muslim leaders in the Gulf-kingdom of Bahrain on November 4 with a message that Catholics and Muslims alike are called to work to promote peace in the world.
Speaking at the Grand Mosque on the grounds of Bahrain’s Sakhir Palace on November 4, the Pope told the Muslim Council of Elders that he wanted to “journey together in the spirit of Francis of Assisi.”
“God is the source of peace. May he enable us to be ‘channels of his peace’ every-where,” Pope Francis said.
The Pope added: “The God of peace never brings about war, never incites hatred, never supports violence. We, who believe in him, are called to promote peace with tools of peace, such as encounter, patient nego-tiations and dialogue, which is the oxygen of peaceful coexistence.”
Pope Francis attended a meeting with the Muslim Council of Elders in Bahrain, Nov. 4, 2022. The Muslim Council of Elders is an international group founded in the United Arab Emirates in 2014 to work together to promote peace, principles of tolerance, address sources of conflict within Muslim communities, and “bring the Islamic nation together,” according to its website.
The council’s board members include Nigerian Sheik Ibrahim Ibn Saleh al-Hu-ssaini; Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Moha-mmed bin Talal; Grand Mufti of Azerbaijan Sheik Allahshükür Hummat Pashazade; and Abdallah bin Bayyah, an influential Islamic scholar who teaches in Saudi Arabia.
Pope Francis told the council: “We who are descended from Abraham, the father of peoples in faith, cannot be concerned merely with those who are ‘our own’ but, as we grow more and more united, we must speak to the entire human community, to all who dwell on this earth.”
Before the meeting at the mosque, Pope Francis spoke privately with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, a leading Sunni cleric and the grand imam of Al-Azhar in Cairo.
Pope Francis with the grand imam Sheik Ahmed Muhammad Al-Tayyib in Bahrain, November 4, 2022.

Pope Francis on November 7 asked religious not to succumb to pessimism over a lack of vocations and to pray with him to “deliver us from the presumption of self-sufficiency and the spirit of worldly criticism.”
Addressing representatives of the Claretianum Institute of the Theology of the Consecrated Life on the occasion of its 50th anni-versary at the Vatican on Nov. 7, the pontiff asked the religious to pray with him to God: “You who feed us with tenderness, deliver us from self-referentiality, from the diabolical deception of pola-rizations, from ‘isms.’”
Pope Francis warned that con-secrated life today should not be discouraged by a “lack of voca-tions or by aging.”
“Those who allow themselves to be caught up in pessimism set aside their faith,” he continued.
“It is the Lord of history who sustains us and invites us to faithfulness and fruitfulness. He cares for his ‘remnant,’ looks with mercy and benevolence upon his work, and continues to send his Holy Spirit.”
Pope Francis with representa-tives of the Claretianum Institute of the Theology of the Conse-crated Life at the Vatican, Nov. 7, 2022.

Forty-five percent of Americans believe the U.S. should be a “Christian nation,” one of several striking findings from a sweeping new Pew Research Center survey examining Christian nationalism. But researchers say respondents differed greatly when it came to outlining what a Christian nation should look like, suggesting a wide spectrum of beliefs. “There are a lot of Americans — 45% — who tell us they think the United States should be a Christian nation. That is a lot of people,” Greg Smith, one of the lead authors of the survey, said in an interview.

Drawing on their experience of the Church of England’s synodal process, high-profile Anglican converts to Catholicism are warning of the perils of Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality.
Two former Anglican bishops, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali and Dr. Gavin Ashenden, who recently came home to Rome, are cautioning against the synod being hijacked by “pressure groups” and the listening process “mistaking the spirit of the age for the Holy Spirit.”
Supported by several ex-Anglican clergy who are now priests in the Catholic Ordinariate, the orthodox converts have been savagely attacked by revisionist Catholics for “fueling fear” because of an “anti-synodal mindset” tainted by an association with Anglicanism.
On November 9 , Ashenden, former chaplain to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, noted that “ex-Anglicans believe they can offer some help” because they have witnessed the “ploy” of synodality used in the Church of England “to such divisive and destructive effect.”
“The fact is that the ex-Anglicans have seen this trick played on the Church before. It is part of the spirituality of the progressives. Very simply put, they wrap up quasi-Marxist content in a spiritual comfort blanket and then talk a lot about the Holy Spirit,” Ashenden warned.
The outcome of the synodal process within Anglicanism was “division, demoralization, spiritual impoverishment, theological incoherence, diminishment of faith, apostasy and a fatal impairment of the church,” the host of the Merely Catholic podcast explained.

A record number of Swiss Catholics formally left the Church in 2021, according to new stati-stics.
The Swiss Institute of Pastoral Sociology (SPI) in St. Gallen said that 34,182 people left the Church last year, around 2,500 more than in the previous record-setting year of 2019.
Around 2.96 million people remained members of the Church at the end of 2021, out of a total Swiss population of roughly 8.7 million.
The Protestant Church in Swi-tzerland also reported a record number of departures in 2021, with 28,540 exits.
Switzerland is a federal re-public composed of 26 cantons. The latest Church departure figures do not include cantons where membership is not linked to the payment of church tax, such as Geneva, Valais, Neuchâtel, and Vaud, reported the Swiss Catholic Church website kath.ch.
The rate of departures varied from canton to canton. Basel-Stadt, Switzerland’s northernmost canton, recorded the highest exit rate of 3.6%, while the nearby cantons of Aargau and Solothurn also recorded relatively high figu-res of 2.4%.
Earlier this month, Pope Fra-ncis accepted the resignation of 59-year-old Bishop Valerio La-zzeri, who had led the Diocese of Lugano in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino, since 2013.

The grand imam of Al-Azhar offered a robust defence of “true” Islam before Pope Francis at the Bahrain Forum for Dialogue on the first day of the pontiff’s apostolic journey to Bahrain.
“What is said and promoted from time to time about the institution of war in Islam against the infidels is not true,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb told Francis at the Sakhir Royal Palace during a dialogue session on Friday.
“Indeed, it is a real lie about Islam and the life of its prophet, even if this is affirmed by some followers of the same religion, a religion that is based on evidence and testimony, not on ambiguity and lies,” al-Tayyeb claimed.
“I hope you are not bored with the constant claims that Islam is a religion of peace and equality,” the grand imam quipped.
Muslim scholars should “be diligent in letting Westerners know about true Islam,” and “continue to highlight what Islam encompasses in terms of lofty ideals, human brotherhood and cooperation, and other commonalities that the West and East agree on and welcome,” al-Tayyeb stressed.
“Western culture should not be represented as the only civilized society and as the standard for judging other cultures. Any interference with other cultures is an abuse of power,” he maintained, quoting words from Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fear of the Barbarians.

Bishop Helmut Dieser of Aachen wants the Catholic Church to take a new perspective on sexuality.
“Same-sex feelings and love are not an aberration, but a variant of human sexuality,” he said in an interview with Deutsche Welle Nov. 8. His remarks were reported by the German Catholic news agency, KNA.
Homosexuals have a right to church support and blessing, said the bishop, who is also the spokesman on abuse issues for the German bishops’ conference. He said the current state of church teaching does not do justice to certain realities when it comes to sexuality: “The thinking is too simple.”
KNA reported the bishop said the church can no longer signal to homosexual people that their feelings are unnatural and that they have to be celibate.
“Homosexuality is — as science shows — not a glitch, not an illness, not an expression of any kind of deficit, and by the way it’s not a consequence of original sin, either,” the bishop said, adding that if two lesbians approached him to have a child baptized, he would do it. “Where is the problem, I ask.”
On Nov. 14-18, Dieser and other German bishops will be at the Vatican to meet with Pope Francis and other Vatican officials for their “ad limina” visits, periodic visits to report on the status of their dioceses.
Dieser also defended the Synodal Path taken by the church in Germany and its demands for reform.
“The Synodal Path is, after all, a consequence of the uncovering of sexual abuse scandals. And reliable scientific studies show that these scandals have systemic causes in the church,” he told Deutsche Welle.
To not respond “would be a failure of authority in the church. We must not ignore the voice of the people of God,” the bishop said.