Australia’s Catholic bishops and religious orders, responding to recommendations from the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, accepted 98 percentage of its suggestions, but said they could not accept recommendations that would violate the seal of confession.

Support independent Catholic journalism. Become an NCR For- ward member for $5 a month.

“We are committed to the safe-
guarding of children and vulnerable
people while maintaining the seal.
We do not see safeguarding and the
seal as mutually exclusive,” said the preamble to a 57-response to dozens of recommendations concerning child safety, formation of priest and religious workers, on-going training in child safety and even out-of-home care service providers.

The response, published Aug. 31, came eight- and-a-half months after the Royal Commission released its 17-volume report on child sexual abuse. The report was based on five years of hearings, nearly 26,000 emails, and more than 42,000 phone calls from concerned Australians. In February 2017,

Australian Church leaders spent three weeks testifying before the commission.

In a statement published with their response, Josephite Sister Monica Cavanagh, president of Catholic Religious Australia, and Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, president of the Australia Catholic Bishops’ Conference, ex- pressed “their deep sorrow that vulnerable children were abused, weren’t believed and weren’t supported when seeking justice.”

Cavanagh said, “The process is already underway to reform the church’s practices to ensure that safeguarding is integral in all that we do as part of our ministry and outreach in the community.”
The statement said Coleridge acknowledge that the church’s response to the abuse scandal had been “too slow and too timid.”

“Many bishops failed to listen, failed to believe, and failed to act,” he was quoted as saying. “Those failures allowed some abusers to offend again and again, with tragic and sometimes fatal consequences.”

The clashes between right- wing demonstrators and antifascist protesters in the eastern German city of Chemnitz in Saxony, where a German with Cuban roots was stabbed to death by an Iraqi and a Syrian on 27 August, have been sharply condemned by church leaders in Germany.

The Catholic Church would always “clearly reject” racism and “migrant bashing,” Father Karl Jüsten, head of the “Katholisches Büro” in Berlin, the German bishops’ conference’s liaison office with the German government, underlined in an interview with ‘domradio.de.’

“It really is terribly depressing to see that many people have obviously rejected the democratic consensus and no longer allow the constitutional state to do its work,” Jursten said. “This time, the police were very quick to act but for a certain group of people that was not enough. It is simply not acceptable that such a group should think they are above the law, should take the law into their own hands and even to declare how the state should behave. I am not accusing all those who joined in the rioting of being Nazis. In Berlin, we have similar problems with left-wing protesters. As a church we must ask ourselves how we can reach those who have rejected the democratic consensus.”

In an effort to move beyond promises and pledges, leaders from around the world have joined the faith community and others in San Francisco to put on display actions under way to address the global threat of climate change, and to mobilize even more.

The three-day Global Climate Action Summit officially opened Sept. 12, and is expected to draw more than 4,000 delegates to the Bay Area. Its primary focus is show- casing the steps taken so far toward fulfilling the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Under that accord, 195 nations committed to limit average global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and as low as 1.5 C (2.7 F).

While the summit, hosted by California Gov. Jerry Brown, will highlight achievements to date in implementing the Paris Agreement — announcements of progress and new commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cities, regions, organizations and companies are expected throughout the three days — it also aims to push the global community to “take ambition to the next level,” the gathering’s theme. Scientists have estimated the planet has already warmed 1 C since the late 19th century and that the initial national pledges under the Paris accord will yield an overall temperature rise of 3 C by the end of the century. In addition, few countries are on track to meet their commitments, and funding for the Green Climate Fund, to assist developing nations in implementing climate mitigation efforts, has been slow to materialize.

The next round of United Nations climate talks, in Katowice, Poland, in December, will serve as the first official stock take of global progress. “Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment,” António Guterres, U.N. Secretary General, said in a speech at U.N. headquarters in New York. He added that if the world doesn’t change course by 2020, “we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.”

“God has made the earth green and beautiful. And there is no greater threat to our ‘green and beautiful’ earth than the more frequent and intense droughts, floods, storms and wildfire brought by climate change, which knows no barrier,” said Nana Firman, co-founder of the Global Muslim Climate Network.

Every fifth diocesan priest
was murdered in Poland occupied by the Germans and Russians.
Four Polish bishops were killed
in the concentration camps, and
nearly half of the Roman Catholic dioceses were deprived of
diocesan bishops. It was also a
war with religion – said the spokesman of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, Fr Pawe B Rytel- Andrianik, on the 79th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. The spokesman of the Episcopate reminded that during the World War II in Poland there was massive persecution of the clergy. “Priests, monks, nuns were shot, sent to concentration camps, imprisoned and tortured. The Germans confiscated the Church’s goods and closed the churches. Nevertheless, the faith of the Church in Poland survived this dark period of German Nazi terror” – he added.

Fr. Rytel-Andrianik pointed to the tragic data from World War II. “According to scientific research, for about 10,000 diocesan priests (in 1939) German Nazis murdered about 2,000 priests, that is every fifth priest. Among about 8,000 monks (in 1939), 370 were murdered. Among about 17,000 nuns, the Nazis murdered about 280 sisters. Additionally, during World War II about 4,000 priests and monks and about 1,100 nuns were imprisoned in German concentration camps. Those who were at large were also repressed” – said the spokesman of the Polish Episcopate. During the World War II, almost half of the Polish dioceses were deprived of diocesan bishops. In twenty-one Roman Catholic dioceses in Poland, nine were without bishops who were interned or forced to emigrate, and one of the diocesan bishops was murdered.