Female pastoral workers in a German parish are triggering outrage among faithful Catholics after the women processed with the Blessed Sacrament on the feast of Corpus Christi.
Marita Franzen and Sandra Ostermann, who hold the position of gemeindereferentin  (pastoral officer) in the Catholic parish of St. Joseph and St. Medardus in Lüdenscheid, were photographed carrying the sacred monstrance in violation of canon law. The parish of St. Medardus bragged on its website that the women lay assistants processing with the Blessed Sacrament constituted a “new achievement.”

In what’s likely to be seen as a classic example of the adage that “personnel is policy,” Pope Francis on Saturday tapped an Argentine archbishop widely seen as a close ally and ghostwriter for several major papal documents as the Vatican’s new doctrinal czar.
In a July 1 statement, the Vatican said the mandate of Spanish Jesuit Cardinal Luis Ladaria as head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and head of the International Theological Commission has come to an end.
The announcement said that Pope Francis has named Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández of La Plata, Argentina, to succeed Ladaria, formally taking over in mid-September.
A long-time protégé of Francis, Fernández is widely seen as one of the pontiff’s ghost-writers, including for major landmark texts such as his 2015 eco-encyclical Laudato Si’; his 2016 post-synodal exhortation on the family Amoris Laetitia; and his first-ever apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudim, published in 2013 and widely considered a tone-setting text for the rest of Francis’s papacy.
A priest at the time of Francis’s election, Fernández was appointed by the pope as rector of the Pontifical University of Argentina, and he was Francis’s first episcopal appointment.

Honoring Saints Peter and Paul, the patrons of Rome, on their liturgical feast day, Pope Francis said understanding and imitating Jesus is not a matter of following doctrinal formulas or the “rigid observance” of rules and norms.
Rather, it means letting go of preconceived convictions and daily being transformed by his love in order to spread the Gospel to others, the pope said.
Speaking during a Mass for the June 29 Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Francis said the two apostles answered the most essential question for a Christian, “Who is Jesus for me?” in a very specific way: “By following him as his disciples and by proclaiming the Gospel.”
“It is good for us to grow as a Church in the same way, by following the Lord, constantly and humbly seeking him out. It is good for us to become a Church that is also outgoing, finding joy not in the things of the world, but in preaching the Gospel before the world and opening people’s hearts to the presence of God,” he said.
He urged faithful to bring Jesus everywhere they go “with humility and joy: in our city of Rome, in our families, in our relationships and our neighborhoods, in civil society, in the Church, and political life, in the entire world, especially in those places where poverty, decay and marginalization are deeply rooted.”

Pope Francis said on Sunday that he will create 21 new cardinals, including the Vatican’s recently appointed doctrinal chief Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, at a consistory on Sept. 30.
The 86-year-old pope made the announcement from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square after reciting the Angelus prayer on July 9.
This is the full list:
• Archbishop Robert Francis Prevost, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops (United States)
• Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (Argentina)
• Archbishop Christophe Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. (France)
• Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem (Italy)
• Archbishop Emil Paul Tscherrig, Apostolic Nuncio to Italy (Switzerland)
• Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-yan, S.J., Bishop of Hong Kong (China)
• Archbishop José Cobo Cano, Archbishop of Madrid (Spain)
• Archbishop Stephen Brislin, Archbishop of Cape Town (South Africa)
• Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for the Oriental Churches (Italy)
• Archbishop Ángel Sixto Rossi, Archbishop of Córdoba (Argentina)
• Archbishop Luis Rueda Aparicio, Archbishop of Bogotá (Colombia)
• Archbishop Grzegorz Ry, Archbishop of Lodz (Poland)
• Archbishop Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla, Archbishop of Juba (South Sudan)
• Archbishop Protase Rugambwa, Coadjutor Archbishop of Tabora (Tanzania)

522,821 German Catholics left the Church in 2022, the German bishops’ conference announced on June 28–up from 359,338 in 2021, 221,390 in 2020, and 272,771 in 2019.
There are 20,937,590 Catho-lics in Germany, nearly one-quarter of the nation’s population. With the loosening of pandemic restrictions, Sunday Mass attendance increased from 4.3% in 2021 to 5.7% and 2022, according to the bishops’ annual statistical report. Mass attendance was highest in the Diocese of Görlitz (13.1%) and lowest in the Diocese of Trier (3.8%).
There were 155,173 baptisms, 162,506 first Communions, 110,942 confirmations, 35,467 weddings, and 240,144 burials in 2022.
Only 45 men were ordained to the priesthood in 2022: 33 men for Germany’s 27 dioceses, and 12 men for religious orders. The numbers of parishes declined from 9,790 in 2021 to 9,624 in 2022, as did the number of priests (12,280 to 11,987) and permanent deacons (3,253 to 3,184).
1,447 adults entered the Church in 2022 (down slightly from 1,465 in 2021), and 3,753 Catholics who had left the Church returned.

A leading Nigerian human rights organization has published a report claiming that largely Muslim Fulani herdsmen killed about 700 Christians in May as “farewell gifts” to former President Muhamadu Buhari.
Buhari handed over power to new President Bola Tinubu on May 29, but the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law in a June 12 report said Fulani herdsmen had killed hundreds of Christians as a way of bidding farewell to a president accused of using his 2015-2023 tenure to foster an anti-Christian, pro-Muslim agenda in Africa’s most populous state.
“The Nigerian radical Islamic leaders who marked the end of their civilian office tenures on 29th May 2023 were wished ‘farewell’ by Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen, who marked the end of their office tenures by slaughtering not less than 700 defenseless Christians in May 2023 (month of handover),” states the report, compiled by Emeka Umeagbalasi, a Catholic human rights activist and chairman of the organization.
The report, a copy of which was sent to Crux, offers details of alleged Christian killings in several states, noting that “Plateau [state]‘donated’ 350 Christian lives, Benue 190, Kaduna 100, Nasarawa 62, Niger 50, Taraba 40, Borno/Yobe 40, etc.”
“Not less than 1,100 defenseless Christians were hacked to death by Nigerian Government backed Islamic Jihadists in the past 60 days, between 12th April and 12th June 2023,” the report claims, noting that total works out to “a daily average of 17 Christian deaths.”
The report also asserts that 2,150 Christians “have been slaughtered by non-state actors/Nigerian Government backed Islamic Jihadists in the past 160 days, 1st Jan to 12th June 2023. Over 1,400 others were abducted, out of which 10 percent, or 140, may be incapable of returning to their families alive.”
The report claims that 100 churches were razed or destroyed by Islamic Jihadists in the past sixty days, between April 12 and June 12, with 20 pastors attacked.
The new report confirms the trends in an April 10 document which claimed that at least 53,350 Christians have been slaughtered since a 2009 Islamic uprising, with 18,100 churches and 2,200 schools wantonly burned down.

More than half of the global population lives in a country in which state or non-state actors actively persecute people for their religious beliefs, according to the 2023 Religious Freedom in the World report.
The report was released on the first day of Religious Freedom Week, in which the U.S. Catholic bishops have invited Catholics to pray for greater religious liberty both in the U.S. and around the world from June 22–29.
Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic charity, published the report, which put 28 countries in the “red” category for religious freedom, which denotes religious persecution. Those countries are home to more than 4 billion people and make up about 51.6% of the global population.
The red category includes the two most populous countries in the world, China and India, which the report found to be among the worst religious persecutors. All but one of the countries are in either Africa or Asia. Some of the offenders include Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea.
Nicaragua, which ranked in the less severe “orange” category in the 2021 report, has since moved into the “red” category in the 2023 ranking.

This was caused primarily by President Daniel Ortega’s persecution of Catholic clergy and religious orders as a means to consolidate power and silence dissent.

In a decision seen as an act of defiance towards the Russian Orthodox Church, which also has the effect of promoting closer ties with Roman Catholics and other Western branches of Christianity, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has decided to move Christmas to Dec. 25.
Traditionally, Ukrainian Christians, the bulk of whom are Orthodox, have celebrated Christmas on Jan. 7, along with other predominantly Orthodox nations, including Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February of last year.
On May 24, the Council of Bishops of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine voted nearly unanimously to switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar as regards most major feasts, except for Easter and a handful of other feast days, such as the feast of the Trinity.
In a statement following the Council’s decision, Metropolitan Epiphany, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, said the decision “is not an easy one, we have been coming to it for a long time, gradually, step by step, and we are making it carefully.”
However, Epiphany said the decision was “as necessary as the decision to introduce the Ukrainian language in worship instead of the traditional Slavic language, to introduce an autocephalous structure of the Church’s life instead of centuries of subordination.”