A Catholic nun from India serving the war-hit people of Ukraine says hungry and frustrated Russian soldiers now invade Ukrainian homes, loot food and rape women.
“We hear stories of such atrocities almost daily, and we too live in fear and anxiety,” says Sister Ligi Payyappilly, who shelters around 75 women and children besides 50 elderly people at her convent at Mukachevo in western Ukraine.
The 48-year-old superior of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Saint-Marc convent says the Russian soldiers have now started attacking camps and government shelter homes for refugees, besides residential homes.
“They want food and sex, and they are hungry, angry and frustrated,” Sister Payyappilly told on April 7.
The nun, who came to limelight when she helped overseas students escape to neighbouring countries, said the Russian soldiers, who have exhausted their food stock, have no hope of returning home. “They have started acting crazy,” she added.
According to the Washington Post, an estimated 15,000 Russian troops have been killed, three times more are either wounded or taken prisoner in Ukraine — an estimate from NATO, based on the assumption that for every soldier killed, three are wounded.
As the Russian invasion entered the 41st day on April 6, human casualties remained high for Russians whereas Ukrainians have suffered huge infrastructure loss. The Russians in the invaded land are now attacking civilians, according to Sister Payyappilly, a Ukrainian citizen now.
When the war started on February 24, Mukachevo and other places in western Ukraine were safe. However, the Russians have now started attacking the western region.

Pope Francis returned to Rome on Sunday after a two-day trip to Malta. During the April 2-3 visit, he addressed civil authorities, visited a Marian shrine and the site where tradition holds that St. Paul stayed in 60 A.D., celebrated an outdoor Mass, and met with migrants and refugees.
Pope Francis’ press conference on the flight from Malta.
“My health is a bit fickle, I have this knee problem that brings out problems with walking. It is a bit annoying, but it is getting better, at least I can walk, until a week ago I couldn’t do it. It’s a slow thing this winter… at this age, you don’t know how the match will end. Let’s hope it goes well.” Pope Francis’ said in a press conference on the flight from Malta.
“The way Europe is making room, with much generosity, to Ukrainians, opening the door to Ukrainians, they are doing even to those who come from the Mediterranean. This is a point that finished my visit [and] touched me so much. I felt their suffering, which is more or less what I told you is in that little book that came out, “Hermanito,” in Spanish, “the little brother,” the suffering of these people. One person who spoke today had to pay four times. I ask you to think about this.”
“War is always a cruelty, an inhumane thing that goes against the human spirit – I don’t say Christian, human. It is the spirit of Cain that is said to go there. I am willing to do everything that can be done, and the Holy See, especially the diplomatic part – Cardinal Parolin, Msgr. Gallagher – are doing everything, everything. You cannot publish everything they do, out of prudence, out of confidentiality, but we are at the limit of the work. A trip is among the possibilities.” As a message for Putin the Pope said.

Pope Francis lamented the “sacrilegious war” in Ukraine as he prayed the Angelus in Malta on April 3. Speaking immediately after celebrating an outdoor Mass in the Maltese capital, Valletta, on April 3, the Pope urged Catholics to pray for people aiding the suffering following the full-scale Russian invasion.
“May the Lord accompany you, and Our Lady keep you,” he said. “Let us now pray to her for peace, as we think of the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in war-torn Ukraine, still under the bombardment of this sacrilegious war. May we be tireless in praying and in offering assistance to those who suffer.”
The Pope has referred to the war throughout his two-day trip to the archipelago in the central Mediterranean Sea. Before leaving Rome, he met with a group of Ukrainian refugees. On the flight to Malta, he said that a papal visit to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv was “on the table.” In a speech to Malta’s civil authorities on the first day of his visit, the Pope alluded to the war in Ukraine, saying: “Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that will either be shared, or not be at all.”
In his brief address before reciting the Angelus prayer, the Pope thanked the Maltese authorities and people for their warm welcome.

German Cardinal Reinhard Marx said in an interview published on March 31 that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is “not set in stone” and “one is also allowed to doubt what it says.” The cardinal made the comments in a seven-page spread in the March 31 edition of the weekly current affairs magazine Stern, reported.
Marx, the archbishop of Munich and Freising, is one of the most influential Catholic leaders in Europe, serving as a member of Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinal Advisers and president of the Vatican’s Council for the Economy. He spoke about the Catechism in response to a question about “how homosexual, queer, or trans people are to be accommodated in Catholic teaching.”
He said: “An inclusive ethic that we envision is not about being lax — as some claim. It is about something else: encounter at eye level, respect for the other. The value of love is shown in the relationship; in not making the other person an object, in not using or humiliating the other person, in being faithful and dependable to each other. The Catechism is not set in stone. One may also doubt what it says.”
He went on: “We discussed these questions during the family synod, but there was reluctance to set something down. Even then I said: there are people living in an intimate love relationship that is expressed sexually. Are we really going to say that this is worthless?”

When journalist Olga M. Segura initially set out to write a book on Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church, she intended it to be more of an overview that might prompt white Catholics to get more involved in the work of racial justice.
That was back in early 2020, when she first started writing. Then, the pandemic hit, followed soon after by nationwide protests after George Floyd died while in Minneapolis police custody.
Her book, published last April, essentially took on a new life. As she puts it: “I thought, ‘OK, it’s not about gentle accompaniment anymore.’” Instead, she said the book’s emphasis became about helping Catholics understand how the church is suffering and how Catholics of colour are “struggling in ways that people might not even be thinking about.”
It also ended up becoming more personal because Segura, a Black Catholic who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, wanted to share some of her own experience.
The freelance writer and opinion editor at the National Catholic Reporter said she realized that what she was going through at the time was not an anomaly. “This is everyone in my community,” she said, adding that the book also revealed her faith struggles, particularly her feeling that her church was no longer providing a safe space for her or other non-white Catholics.

Olga and her youngest children are safe in Poland, but she is consumed with worry for her husband and oldest son, who are still in Ukraine.
And her heart breaks when the little ones ask questions, including about why Russia invaded Ukraine when so many Russians live in Ukraine and when so many of their families are intermarried.
Everything is difficult to explain to the children, Olga said. “The youngest (two) don’t notice so much, but the oldest asks when he will see his father. I tell him the truth. He asks why uncles shoot at his father. And ‘When daddy dies, will he come to us?’”
“I don’t know how to answer these questions and I want to cry,” she said. Olga and her three children — Dima, 2, Natasha, 4, and Nazar, 6 — and her friend Alina and Alina’s 4-year-old son, Alexander, and 19-year-old daughter, Anna, found safe haven with the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family in Lublin. The Ukrainian women asked that their real names not be used.
The Polish Conference of Major Superiors of Women said March 15 that an estimated 18,000 refugees from Ukraine were receiving spiritual, psycho-logical, medical and material help at 924 convents in Poland and that close to 500 of those communities are sheltering almost 3,000 adults – mostly women – and more than 3,000 children. Olga and Alina met at a prayer group near their homes in the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast (district) in southeastern Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s campaign of violence in Ukraine has brought to the fore questions about his longstanding religious connect-ions, prompting scholars and journalists to challenge his well-markete d piety and seemingly deep devotion to Russian Ortho-dox spirituality—the latter of which is often expressed in its deep ties to the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. In the study of religion, it’s long been common to question whether the categories of sincere or authentic religious belief are adequate for analyzing the complex motivations and actions of adherents or believers.
When practitioners are public figures with global geopolitical aims, the classification of true religious subjectivity is often suspended in favour of assuming a kind of charlatanism, or spiritually spurious intentions built to curry favour with faith com-munities. Our goal here isn’t to argue about Putin’s personal faith; rather, we want to reflect on how academic assumptions about individual religious practices and beliefs are often analysed through categories that typically begin and end with western conceptions of what counts as correct or wholehearted spirituality. In other words, we want to question the questioning of Putin’s faith.
Patriarch Kirill isn’t just a willing participant in the trans-national expansion of Russian power, culture, and Christianity-he’s a co-conspirator in this world building project of faith and politics.

One of the Orthodox scholars who signed a statement condemning as “heresy” the political vision of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is a U.S.-born Russian Orthodox nun and scholar of Byzantine liturgy.
Sister Vassa Larin, a nun of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, also is host of the popular podcast and video series, “Coffee with Sister Vassa.”
Living and working in Vienna, Sister Vassa also serves on the liturgical and canon law commissions of the Russian Orthodox Church, and now she is helping support a Ukrainian Catholic mother and her two children who fled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
In an interview with Catholic News Service March 18, she denounced the war as “evil” and Patriarch Kirill’s approach to it as a “horrible, horrible thing.”
For decades, the patriarch has been promoting a teaching called “Russkii Mir” (Russian World), which claims a special status for the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian nation working closely together to govern politically and spiritually not only Russia, but all Russian speakers and the people they believe are closely related to them: Ukrainians and Belarussians.
“It is not a Christian thing,” Sister Vassa said, even if Patriarch Kirill and President Putin try to cloak it in Christian language and present themselves as defenders of traditional Christian values.
“What unites us is not being Russian; that’s not the primary thing in the mystery of the church,” she said. “The church is a mystery of unity, a sacrament of unity, based on the oneness of the Body of Christ. It’s not based on ethnicity.”
While she describes herself as “a big Pope Francis fan,” Sister Vassa said that as an Orthodox Christian, she does have some questions about his plan to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the “Immaculate Heart of Mary” on March 25.

Last week, more than a dozen religious and political leaders sat on the dais of the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr on the Upper West Side, listening to solemn prayers and fiery speeches denouncing Russia and extolling Ukrainian resistance to the invasion that began two weeks earlier.
They gave speeches, one by one: the leaders of the Ukrainian, Greek and American Orthodox churches; a prominent rabbi; the leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York; even Gov. Kathy Hoch-ul of New York.
But one group was missing from this interfaith tableau: the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, is an ally of President Vladimir V. Putin. Organizers said Russian Orthodox leaders in New York had been invited but did not reply.

Following Pope Francis’ two audiences with delegations of Canada’s Métis and Inuit peoples, members of the Métis Nation say the Pope sought to listen to the stories of survivors of residential schools.
“Truth, justice, healing, reconciliation.”
Those words express the goals which delegations from several of Canada’s indigenous peoples came to share with Pope Francis in the last week of March, in an effort to heal the pain caused by residential schools.
Two delegations met with the Pope on March 28 in successive audiences—one from the Métis Nation and another from the Inuit People. They were accompanied by several Bishops from the Canadian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, with each delegation meeting with the Pope for roughly an hour.
The Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, said in a statement that the audiences were focused on giving the Pope the opportunity to “listen and to offer space for the painful stories shared by the survivors.”
In his Angelus address on June 6, 2020, Pope Francis shared with the world his dismay at the dramatic news which had come a few weeks earlier, of the discovery in Canada of a mass grave in the Kamloops Indian Residential School, with more than 200 bodies of indigenous people.
The discovery marked a symbol of a cruel past, which sought, from 1880 to the final decades of the 20th century saw government-funded institutions run by Christian organizations, to educate and convert indigenous youth and assimilate them into mainstream Canadian society, through systematic abuse.
The discovery in June 2020 led Canada’s Bishops to make an apology and set up a series of projects to support survivors. The importance of the process of reconciliation is shown by the Pope’s willingness to receive the delegations in the Vatican on Monday and on 31 March, in view of a future papal visit in Canada, which has been announced by not yet officially confirmed.