A Catholic nun serving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was among the seven people killed October 19 evening when gunmen aligned with the Islamic State attacked a Catholic mission hospital in a raid.
Sister Marie-Sylvie Kavuke Vakatsuraki and six patients at the hospital were killed Oct. 19 when gunmen with the Allied Democratic Forces raided Maboya village, in the country’s northeast province of North Kivu, International Christian Concern reports.
Several people who work or live near the hospital, including two nuns, were missing in the wake of the attack and are feared to be abducted by the raiders, according to International Christian Concern.
The Allied Democratic Forces are rebels from neighboring Uganda. They are aligned with the Islamic State. The group of gunmen which attacked Maboya also stole drugs and medical equipment from the hospital, and set it on fire.
Bishop Melchisédec Sikuli Paluku of Butembo-Beni lamented the killings and strongly condemned the attack. Sister Marie-Sylvie was a medical doctor and a member of the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Presentation of Our Lady at the Temple, the bishop said.
“May the soul of our dear Sister Doctor Marie-Sylvie Kavuke Vakatsuraki, who passed away in the service of her brothers and sisters, rest in peace through the mercy of God!” Paluku said in an Oct. 20 statement obtained by ACI Africa, CNA’s partner agency.
“Words cannot express the horror that has more than crossed the threshold!” he added.

The Vatican’s Secretary of State told employees and colla-borators of EWTN this week that the truth must be “fearlessly upheld” with a merciful and list-ening style.
Speaking at a dinner in Fra-scati, Italy, Oct. 19, Cardinal Pietro Parolin recalled the words of Mother Angelica, the founder of EWTN, who said, “You can-not go to heaven hating someone. Forgive now. Be compassionate now. Be patient and grateful now.” Parolin said the Catholic media should not spread hate, but “promote a non-hostile co-mmunication.”
“The truth, and the values deriving from it, must be fear-lessly upheld,” he continued. “This proclamation, however, should be formulated in a merci-ful style by those who patiently listen to the women and men of our time, who walk with them, even making themselves the interpreters of their suffering and their concerns.”
The secretary of state, who is the second most powerful person in the Vatican after the pope, addressed EWTN during the glo-bal Catholic television network’s seventh European affiliates meet-ing. Parolin underlined that “tru-th, for us Christians, is a Person, the Person of Jesus Christ who, as St. Paul says, holds all things together.”
“It is this encounter that ensures that communication does not remain simply a profession which conveys information but that understands and sets this responsibility within a broader horizon than the albeit important dissemination of news,” he said.
The cardinal recalled Mother Angelica’s saying, “it is our duty to speak the truth, and each per-son can either assume or not assu-me this duty. But the truth must above all be within us.”
“We should always keep this statement in mind and have the same awareness: the truth does not belong to us — we serve the truth,” Parolin commented. “And we can serve it only in love and in unity.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said October 23 it’s up to Ukraine to decide the time and terms of peace with Russia, and he cautioned that the end of war “can’t be the consecration of the law of the strongest.”
Speaking at the opening of a three-day peace conference in Rome, Macron said the international community will be there when the Ukrainian government chooses that time.
“To stay neutral would mean accepting the world order of the strongest, and I don’t agree with this,” Macron said at the conference organized by a Catholic charity with close ties to the Vatican.
There is concern that support from Ukraine’s allies in Europe might be eroded due to soaring energy costs with the approach of winter.
Pope Francis is scheduled to conclude the Cry for Peace conference, sponsored by the Sant’Egidio Community, with a speech Tuesday at the Colosseum.

The Monastery of Mor Efrem (St Ephrem) in Mardin, southern Turkey, an area which was once the heartland of Syriac Christia-nity, has once again opened its doors to believers.
Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan, head of the Syriac Ca-tholic Church, presided over the re-consecration of the building, and celebrated its first Divine Liturgy in a hundred years.
Founded in 1881, the Syriac monastery was seized by the Turkish army during the First World War. It briefly returned to the Church after the war ended, before being transformed into a military hospital in 1922. In more recent times, it had served as a prison and a warehouse.
Patriarch Younan consecrat-ed the church according to the Syriac rite on 13 October, anoint-ing the altar, walls, and doors with oil of chrism, before cele-brating the Divine Liturgy.
The ceremony was attended by Syriac Catholic prelates from across Turkey and the Middle East, the Apostolic Nuncio to Turkey, and Syriac Orthodox bishops and clergy.

On October 27 the Vatican released the working document for the next stage in Pope Francis’s ongoing Synod of Bishops on Synodality, which offered a global view of what faithful at all levels of the Church believe needs to happen for it to be a true place of inclusion.
The document, published Oct. 27 and titled “Enlarge the Space of your Tent,” is a summary of reports from national bishops’ conferences, who compiled the reports based on contributions from individual dioceses after an initial consultation phase with local parish communities.
It will serve as the working document for the next, continental stage of the synod, in which episcopal conferences on all seven continents will hold assemblies to reflect on and discuss the contents of the document. These assemblies will then submit a new report based on that discussion, which will be used to draft the working document for the final, universal stage in Rome.
Formally called “For a synodal Church: Communion, participation, mission,” the synod was opened by Pope Francis last October and, rather than the typical month-long meeting of bishops at the Vatican that a synod usually is, this one is unfolding in a multi-stage process extending into 2024.
An initial, diocesan phase of the process lasted from October 2021 to April 2022 and was designed as a consultative process that took place according to certain guidelines issued by the Synod of Bishops. A second, continental phase, began in September and will last through March 2023, when continental bishops’ conferences will coordinate and evaluate the results of the diocesan consultations.
Though notoriously difficult to define, “synodality” is generally understood to refer to a collaborative and consultative style of management in which all members, clerical and lay, participate in making decisions about the church’s life and mission.
In terms of listening and inclusion, the document said groups that often feel excluded are women, remarried divorcees, single parents, people living in a polygamous marriage, LGBTQ individuals, and men who have left the priesthood, as well as the poor, the elderly, indigenous people and migrants, drug and alcohol addicts, and victims of trafficking.
“A growing awareness and sensitivity towards this issue is registered all over the world,” the document said, noting that reports from all continents included an appeal for women, both lay and religious, to be valued as “equal members of the People of God.”

Growing up in a home with a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Iranian American Shirin Taber had a special appreciation for being able to choose what she believed. When she told her dad that she wished everyone back in Iran could have the same freedom, he—knowing the harsh reality of the regime—said it would never happen.
The political pushback, Taber says, correlates with a growing disillusionment with Islam itself, too. Iranians are spiritually hungry and looking for answers; even with government restrictions on religion, the church continues to grow through Christian teaching coming into the Islamic nation over satellite TV. “It’s not just about a hijab, we want systematic change. We want to topple the regime. We no longer want to live in a one-state religion. We no longer want the state to dictate to us what our faith should look like, how we practice it, how we live it. We want separation of church and state. We want separation of Islam and the state.”

The Second Vatican Council was “not only meaningful, but necessary,” retired Pope Benedict XVI said in a letter to a conference about his theological work at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
A theological understanding of the world’s different religions, the relationship between faith and reason and, especially, the nature and mission of the church in the modern world were challenges the Catholic Church needed to face, the retired pope wrote in the message read Oct. 20.
The Vatican-based Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Foundation sponsored the conference Oct. 20-21 on “Joseph Ratzinger’s Vision of the Church and Its Relevance for Contemporary Challenges.”
In his letter to conference participants, the retired pope said he hoped their discussions and an understanding of his theological work before, during and after Vatican II would “be helpful in the struggle for a right understanding of the church and the world in our time.”
As a priest and theologian, Father Ratzinger attended all four sessions of the council as a theological adviser — a “peritus” — to the archbishop of Cologne, Germany.
St. John XXIII’s decision to call the council, he said in the letter, was a surprise to everyone and many people initially thought it would “unsettle and shake the church more than to give her a new clarity for her mission.”
But “the need to reformulate the question of the nature and mission of the church has gradually become apparent. In this way, the positive power of the council is also slowly emerging,” he wrote.

Cardinal Angelo Becciu off-ered to personally reimburse the Holy See for funds paid to Cecelia Marogna, the Vatican City court heard on  October 13.
In testimony from the card-inal, and from a senior Vatican police officer, judges in the Va-tican’s sprawling financial crimes trial heard that Becciu made the offer after he was informed Inter-pol had flagged payments to Mar-gona, the self-styled international security consultant and private spy, which had been authorized by the cardinal.
According to Stefano De Santis, a senior officer in the Va-tican City’s corps of gendarmes, he and Vatican police chief Gian-luca Broccoletti visited Becciu at his Vatican apartments in early October of 2020, at the cardinal’s request, to update him on their findings regarding Marogna.
De Santis told the court that he and Broccoletti informed the cardinal that Interpol had flagged a series of payments totalling some 575,000 euros to Marog-na’s Slovenian-registered comp-any, which had been spent prima-rily on luxury goods and hotels.
According to the police inve-stigator, Becciu offered to repay the funds from his personal account at the IOR, a Vatican bank, and asked them to keep the matter confidential because it would cause “serious harm” to the cardinal and his family.
Marogna, who is charged with embezzlement during the current Vatican trial, has not presented herself in court and successfully fought against extra-dition to the Vatican in 2021.

Cardinal George Pell is warning of catastrophic consequences for the Catholic Church if Pope Francis does not correct “serious heresies” being promoted by the German Synodal Way.
“The synodal process has begun disastrously in Germany,” the Australian prelate laments, “and matters will become worse unless we soon have effective papal corrections on, for instance, Christian sexual morality, women priests, etc.”
The former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, who was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of sexual abuse and later acquitted, underscores the words of “some faithful German Catholics [who] are already talking, not of the synodal way but the suicidal way.”
Referring to Pope Francis’ invitation to lapsed Catholics, Protestants and even atheists to participate in the Synod on Synodality, Pell insists that “every synod has to be a Catholic synod, bound by the apostolic Tradition, just as Councils are so bound.”
“There can be no pluralism of important doctrines of faith or morals,” Pell categorically states. “Our unity is not like that of a loose Anglican federation or that of the many national Orthodox Churches.”
“Serious heresies” in the synodal process are “undermining and damaging the unity of the One, True Church,” in a manner contrary to “Gaudium et Spes’ call for engagement with the modern world in ‘the light of the Gospel,’” he observes.

Priests and bishops in the United States report overwhelmingly that they are “flou-rishing” in ministry, despite pressures caused by two decades of clerical abuse scandals and Church responses.
But while U.S. priests report high levels of personal well-being, they also have a widespread lack of confidence and trust in their bishops, according to a study releas-ed Wednesday by The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
Priests reported that they are less likely to seek personal support from their bishop than they are from any other source, and said they believe bishops regard priests as “liabilities” and “expendable.”
Bishops have had mixed initial reactions to the survey’s findings.
One bishop told The Pillar he is grateful for the report, and praised the work of priests in American dioceses.
Another called the survey results an “examination of conscience” for bishops.
The survey report, “Well-being, Trust, and Policy in a Time of Crisis: Highlights from the National Study of Catholic Priests,” was published October 19 by The Catholic University of America’s department of so-ciology, in conjunction with The Catholic Project, a university institute founded to facilitate collaboration between the Church’s hierarchy and laity, in the wake of the McCarrick sexual abuse scandal.
The survey compiled data from 3,500 priests across 191 U.S. dioceses, and survey-ed bishops, achieving a 67 percent response rate among the American episcopate.
Despite declining numbers of practicing Catholics, diocesan plans to consolidate parishes, and fewer numbers of priests in active ministry, the survey found that the vast majority of American priests say they are “flourishing.”
Participants were asked a series of questions aimed at assessing their personal well-being according to the Harvard Flou-rishing Index, which measures life satis-faction, mental and physical health, sense of purpose, and quality of relationships.
Across the survey results, more than three-quarters of respondents reported themselves to be flourishing.