The Diocese of Essen has become the first in Germany to allow women to perform baptisms, citing a lack of priests.
The diocese said in a statement Monday that Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck tasked 18 lay ministers – 17 of them women – with conferring the sacrament of admission into the Church at a ceremony over the weekend.
Until now only priests and deacons – roles the Catholic Church reserves for men – were allowed to perform baptisms.
“Time and again, the Church has reacted to external circum-stances over the past 2,000 years,” said Theresa Kohlmeyer, who heads the diocese’s department of belief, liturgy and culture. The measure is temporary and will initially last for three years.

São Paulo State’s Court of Appeals has reversed a 2019 decision that stopped the building of a giant steel statue of the Virgin Mary in Aparecida, the city where Brazil’s major Catholic shrine is located.
Now, the 164-feet stainless steel sculpture portraying Our Lady of Aparecida – taller than Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer – which was donated in 2017 by the artist Gilmar Pinna to the municipality as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the apparition, can finally be finished.
The project includes five small religious statues implanted in different parts of the city along with the large hilltop monument.
But the work was interrupted due to a lawsuit filed by the Brazilian Atheists and Agnostics Association (ATEA), which claimed that public funds were being used to pay for religious symbols, which is forbidden by the Brazilian constitution.
However, Pinna said almost all elements that integrated the project had been donated, including the sculpture.

An estimated three million Filipino families, or 11.8% of Filipino families, experienced involuntary hunger in the last quarter of 2021.
A survey done by pollster Social Weather Stations (SWS) shows an 11.8% hunger rate in December 2021, higher than the 10%, or about 2.5 million families, in September 2021.
It is, however, lower than the 16.8% in May 2021 and 13.6% in June 2021.
“The resulting annual average Hunger rate for 2021 is 13.1% versus the record-high 21.1% for 2020. However, this is still above the 9.3% annual average for 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic,” said the SWS in a statement.
On March 26, the presidential palace acknowledged that the government needs to do “much more” to protect citizens from hunger and poverty.

Pope Francis on March 25 consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and Catholic bishops from around the world have already announced they answer his request for them to join him in the consecration.
March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation, and a solemnity on the church calendar. The celebration took place in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica at 5 p.m. local time. Pope emeritus Benedict XVI joined in the consecration. Though some reports speculated he would be in the basilica, Crux has been able to confirm that the retired pontiff won’t be there. Instead, he joined from the Mater Ecclesia monastery where he has lived since leaving office.
On the same day Francis leads the penitential Lenten service, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner, lead a similar act of consecration at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal.

“The war in Ukraine is destroying relations between Christians; it is the great schism of Orthodoxy. There are twice as many practicing Ukrainian Orthodox as there are Russian Orthodox. Most of the dioceses that remained under Moscow jurisdiction after the proclamation of autocephaly in 2018 have decided not to cite Patriarch Kirill’s name in their liturgies anymore. All the other national Orthodox Churches will have to take a more explicit position on what is happening” wrote Stefano Caprio. He continued:
“The war in Ukraine began in 2014 when the Maidan Revolution brought to the fore the opposition between Kyiv and Moscow, a centuries-old confrontation that today has reached its most extreme point.
Whatever the outcome of military operations, peace negotiations and the division of territories, deep and inextricable rancour will remain between the two brotherly peoples, drawing a line between not only Slavs and Europeans, but also between different geopolitical and ideological alignments across the world.
We are all “either Russians or Ukrainians”, “a little Russian and a little Ukrainian”, “neither Russian nor Ukrainian” as this tragedy reshapes the conscious-ness of the men and women of the 21st century, much more than Islamic terrorism in this century’s first 20 years.
This war is destroying relations between Christians much more than all the alternatives and contradictions between East and West, globalizers and sovereigntists, Atlanticists and pacifists, neo-Nazis and theorists of real or alleged conspiracies.
For weeks, religious leaders around the globe had been begging the bearded patriarch to speak out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But in weekly sermons that air live on Russian TV, Kirill, 75, has done just the opposite, painting the war as an apocalyptic battle against evil forces that have sought to destroy the God-given unity of Holy Russia.

Over the past week, two leading European cardinals, both of whom enjoy broad favour with Pope Francis, have made public statements calling for a change in the Catholic Church’s current position on the issues of homosexuality and priestly celibacy.
In an interview published in Germany’s Catholic News Agency (KNA) earlier this week, Jesuit Cardinal Jean Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg, voiced his belief that the Church’s position viewing homosexual relationships is wrong.
“I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct,” he said, saying the time has come to revise this position, and suggesting that Pope Francis’s own rhetoric on homosexuality could open the door for this change to take place.
Since the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis, who has also voiced concern over homosexuality in the priesthood, has taken a softer approach to the issue and has urged the Church to be more welcoming to homosexual individuals and to families with homosexual members.
In 2013, he signalled a new approach to the issue with his famous declaration that if a person “is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will… Who am I to judge?”
In 2018, he said that the Church has to find a way to help the parents of gays and lesbians so that they “stand by” their children, telling parents with LGBT children, “Do not condemn. Dialogue. Understand. Make space for the son or daughter; make space so they express themselves.”
During an interview in 2019, Francis said he does not think it’s rare for parents to have a homosexual child and said that homosexual tendencies “are not a sin,” insisting that tendencies themselves “are not sin. If you have a tendency to anger, it’s not a sin. Now, if you are angry and hurt people, the sin is there.”
Last year, he met with a group of parents of LGBT children, telling them that God loves their children as they are, and that the Church loves them because they are “children of God.”

Women religious in Ukraine are facing Russia’s full-scale invasion of that nation with deter-mined faith and a commitment to service.
Two sisters of the Order of Saint Basil the Great spoke with CatholicPhilly.com directly from Ukraine February 23 and 24 via telephone and the messaging app Viber.
“We understand that this is our new mission, to welcome the refugee,” said Basilian Sister Lucia Murashko, whose convent, the monastery of SS. Peter and Paul in Zaporizhzhia, is located about 125 miles from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
Earlier February 24, when Russian airstrikes began to imp-act Ukrainian cities, Sister Murashko and her three fellow women religious welcomed two families, with more expected as residents flee the attacks.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated more than 100,000 people have already left their homes in Ukraine since Russian forces openly entered that nation Feb. 24. The Ukrainian military reports losing at least 40 troops so far, with an unspecified number of civilian casualties. Nuns from the Order of St. Basil the Great are pictured Feb. 22, 2022, during a pilgrimage in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, just hours ahead of a Russian invasion.

European bishops, both Catholic and Russian Orthodox, are pleading for the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, to ask Vladimir Putin to stop the war against Ukraine.
According to the Metropolitan of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, “our very unity is threatened” by the situation that arose following Russia’s “military intervention” and “violent attack” on Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE) said Kirill should take to heart his own remarks: “The Church can be a peace making force.”
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich addressed a letter to Kirill on Tuesday asking him to issue an urgent appeal to Russian authorities to immediately stop the hostilities against the Ukrainian people. The content of the letter was released on Thursday.
“In these dark moments for humanity, accompanied by in-tense feelings of hopelessness and fear, many look to you, Your Holiness, as someone who could bring a sign of hope for a peaceful solution to this conflict,” Hollerich wrote to Kirill.

Just one in five Christian women in the United Kingdom claim females should not be in authority over men in Church leadership.
That’s one finding from a new survey conducted by Premier with more than 800 women from across the country.
It also found, four out of five Christian women say their Church is a place where female voices are always listened to and honoured.
The findings are being re-leased on International Women’s Day. To mark the occasion, we’ve been speaking to a variety of women who hold different roles within their church.
Priscilla Reid is a former Church elder from Christian Fellowship Church (CFC), in Belfast, Northern Ireland where she served for 20 years.
She told Premier her experience of becoming a church elder was quite positive, however that was not the case for others: “I think I was in a very smooth, privileged, blessed position com-pared to some of the stories I hear from other women who’ve been in leadership.
“I really didn’t come up against a lot of opposition.
“I did feel affirmed. I did feel the doors open for me. I never felt like I was I was getting a lot of resistance.
“[However] I’ve met a lot of women who’ve been actually very damaged. I met with one just on Friday and she was damaged by the reactions of many male colleagues.
“Perhaps out of their in-securities, things that would be valued in a man are presented as negative in a woman.”
Reid talked about how certain scripture in the Bible – of only men being allowed to become elders in the church – was taken in literal context, by some of their congregation. Something she believed should be challenged.
“It was really important for us that we could say, hand on heart, there is another way to view these difficult passages of scripture, there is another theological proposition that is totally valid and so therefore, we did study it.”

A photo of a statue of Jesus being removed from a Ukrainian cathedral and put into storage has prompted hundreds of retweets as the world grasps the full implications of the Russian shelling in Ukraine.
The tweet about the statue, from the Armenian Cathedral of Lviv, has prompted reactions from believers and non-believers alike regarding the cultural and spiritual impact of the war on Ukraine’s cityscape and heritage. While some have compared the potential destruction of untold numbers of artifacts to recent conflicts in other countries, others have compared the image to the 17th century painting The Descent from the Cross by Rubens.
The image was posted by cultural protection property officer Tim LeBerre, who claimed that it was the first time the statue had been taken out of the cathedral since World War One.
Tim LeBerre also shared an image of the Ukrainian National Museum being packed away due to concern about the fate of the priceless items. Another image shows the devastation caused by the shelling of a Catholic church in Kharkiv.