The archbishop of one of the world’s most dangerous dioceses has described how he has to have five guard dogs to protect him at home, and travels around with an armed escort. Archbishop Matthew Ndagoso of Kaduna in northern Nigeria gave Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) a glimpse into life in his diocese in northern Nigeria.
He said that eight of his priests had been kidnapped in just three years – three were killed, one is still missing and the others were freed. He added that one of the murdered priests in particular had shown tremendous courage.
The archbishop said: “While they were pointing an AK-47 at him, he told his attackers that they should repent of their evil, so they killed him.”
Life is increasingly dangerous for Christians in many parts of Nigeria, as highlighted in ACN’s 2022 edition of Persecuted and Forgotten?

The Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem joined Anglican pri-mates from every corner of the British Isles on Saturday for the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III at Westminster Abbey. Nine bishops from the Church of England also took part in the liturgy, which was des-cribed by a spokesman for Lam-beth Palace as “a Christian act of worship that honours the ancient tradition of anointing and crowning Monarchs.
The Archbishop of Canter-bury, Justin Welby, led the ser-vice, which was set in the context of a Eucharist. In his sermon, which reflected the theme “Called to Serve.”
“We are here to crown a King, and we crown a King to serve,” Archbishop Justin said. “What is given today is for the gain of all. For Jesus Christ announced a Kingdom in which the poor and oppressed are freed from the chains of injustice. The blind see. The bruised and broken-hearted are healed.
“That Kingdom sets the aims of all righteous government, all authority. And the Kingdom also sets the means of all government and authority. For Jesus doesn’t grasp power or hold onto status.
“The King of Kings, Jesus Christ, was anointed not to be served, but to serve. He creates the unchangeable law of good authority that with the privilege of power comes the duty to serve.
“Service is love in action. We see active love in our care for the most vulnerable, the way we nurture and encourage the young, in the conservation of the natural world. We have seen those priorities in the life of duty lived by our King.”
The Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Most Revd Dr Hosam Naoum, presented the chrism oil for anointing to Archbishop Justin. The oil was made from olives taken from trees growing in two monasteries on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The oil was blended and co-consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, His Beatitude Theophilus III and Archbishop Hosam.
The King was anointed on his head, hands and breast in a sacred moment shielded from public view.
After this, various regalia and items from the collection of Crown Jewels were symbolically presented to the King.

A parish priest was shot dead as he drove on a rural Mexican highway on May 22, marking yet another attack in what has become the most murderous country for Catholic clergy.
Augustinian Father Javier García Villafaña was killed at around 7 p.m. (local time) in the municipality of Huandacareo in Michoacán state to the west of Mexico City. Father García was found dead with gunshot wounds.
The Archdiocese of Morelia acknowledged Father García’s death, but provided little information and did not respond to a request for comment. The Catholic Multimedia Center, which tracks attacks on the clergy, reported Father García had assumed responsibility for the Our Lord of Atonement Parish in Huandacareo on April 23.
The murder of Father García followed a May 21 attack on Archbishop Faustino Armendáriz Jiménez of Durango, who said an elderly man swung a knife at him in the sacristy of Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in the northwest Mexican state.
Archbishop Armendáriz was unharmed in the attack, though the knife slashed through his clothes, tearing them.
Father García’s death marks the ninth fatal attack on clergy during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to the Catholic Multimedia Centre.
Church observers lack a cogent explanation for the attacks on the clergy, though they point to rising violence in Mexico after the federal government launched a crackdown on drug cartels in December 2006.

A leading Nigerian human rights organization has published a report with sobering statistics on summary executions, maiming, forced disappearances and illegal detentions in Imo state of southeast Nigeria.
Presenting the report during a press conference May 21, Emeka Umeagbalasi, a Catholic human rights activist and chairman of the Intersociety organization, said that in just 29 months, from January 2021-May 2023, “security forces and allied militias killed 900 unarmed citizens, wounded 700, arrested 3,500, extorted 1,400, disappeared 300.”
In addition, the report said 1,200 civilian houses were burned down, displacing 30,000 owners and their families and forcing 500,000 citizens to flee.

According to the report, non-state actors, such as Fulani jihadists and other militias were responsible for most of the deaths — 700 — and for an additional 900 kidnappings that occurred during the same time period.
Most of those killed in Imo state and elsewhere in southeast Nigeria might have been targeted because of their Christian faith, the report’s authors stressed.
Umeagbalasi said that people are slain based on their ethnicity and religion, and he criticized the Nigerian police for rarely looking into the crimes.
“We are not against the police and security agencies performing their jobs,” Umeagbalasi told journalists, “but they have to do that within the confines of the law.”
“You don’t leave the fighting parties” and “turn a blind eye” on civilians, he said.

A leading Asian theologian says Pope Francis’ decision to include non-ordained women and men as voting members of October’s synod assembly is a “giant step” that will irreversibly change the Church’s decision-making processes.
Last month, the synod secretariat announced the Pope had authorised a reform to allow at least 70 non-bishops to be members of the 4-29 October synod assembly in the Vatican. This move will see women given a vote in a synod for the first time.
Fr Vimal Tirimanna is one of the theological advisers to the synod and a professor of moral theology who teaches in Sri Lanka and Rome.
“Things will never be reversed again. It’s a giant step, not a small step,” he told a webinar organised by The Tablet on the synod process on 17 May 2023.
“Even if nothing happens in the rest of the synodal process, this particular fact that 70 non-bishops are going to be there, is a big change. I don’t think it can be changed. At last, what Vatican II wanted has been realised – the process has begun.”
Fr Tirimanna, a Redemptorist priest who was involved in helping to draft the ”Enlarge the Space of Your Tent” synod document, explained that Francis’ reforms are a recovery of what took place in synods during the first millennium of Christianity.
He pointed out that when Paul VI established the synod of bishops in 1965, he never ruled out that synods would evolve, with the possibility of them becoming “synods of the People of God”.
The Pope’s changes, he said, are an attempt to “walk the talk” of Vatican II.
But Fr Tirimanna said there is still a lot of resistance to the synod among bishops, and from those who erroneously think the Pope is trying to take the Catholic Church in a “Protestant” direction.
“I am a little taken aback when I hear some voices, even here in Rome, which say, ‘Well this Pope has come from nowhere, and he’s trying to make the Catholic Church a Protestant Church’,” he said.

A court in military-ruled Myanmar has dismissed an appeal by a prominent ethnic Christian leader four weeks after he was imprisoned and a day before thousands of political prisoners were freed.
Myitkyina Prison Court in Kachin state rejected an appeal from Dr. Hkalam Samson on May 2, according to media reports, quoting the defendant’s lawyer.
His lawyer told reporters that Samson, a former leader of the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC) who was sentenced by the same court on April 7 to six years in prison for unlawful association, defaming the state and terrorism, will appeal to higher courts.
The prison court rejected his appeal a day before 2,135 political prisoners were freed from various prisons across the country on May 3, the day Myanmar marked Vesak, an auspicious day in the Buddhist majority nation.
Most of those who benefited had been sentenced under Section 505(a) of the penal code for inciting opposition to the military regime, which carries a maximum jail term of three years.
More than 21,000 people have been arrested since the military seized power after toppling Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi-led civilian government on Feb.1, 2021, according to a local monitoring group.

Amnesty International said in a report that it is deeply concerned about thousands of individuals still unjustly languishing in prisons across Myanmar, including Samson.

“This long overdue release should mark the first step towards the immediate release of all individuals who have been arbitrarily detained for exercising their basic rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly or other human rights,” Ming Ye Hah, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for campaigns, said in a statement on May 3.

Shanghai’s newly installed Bishop Joseph Shen Bin welcomed three officials of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in the diocese. They also jointly unveiled a studio the diocese built, a report on the Shanghai diocesan website said.
The three-member team included the conference’s vice chair, Qian Feng, its director for the regional working committee, Yu Xiufen, and Xu Mei, the conference’s deputy director of the Ethnic and Religious Committee.
Shen briefed the officials on the current situation of Shanghai diocese and efforts to implement the CCP’s sinicization policy, the report said.
Sinicization is a political ideology promoted by the CCP that aims to impose strict rules on societies and institutions based on the core values of socialism, autonomy, and supporting the leadership of the party, across ethnic and religious communities in China.
Shen was appointed bishop of Haimen, with both government recognition and a papal mandate in 2010. The state-controlled Church appointed him bishop of Shanghai on April 4, apparently violating the Vatican-China agreement of 2018 on the appointment of bishops.
Shen is reportedly the head of the state-run Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China, which the Vatican does not recognize. In 2017 he was also the vice president of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the state-initiated organization administering the Church in China.
During the meeting with the officials, Shen was accompanied by senior clergy, including Father Ignatius Wu Jianlin, a CPPCC political advisor, and Father Gu Zhangjun, vicar-general of the diocese that covers China’s largest city and major economic hub. Feng urged Catholics to adhere to the direction of the sinicization of religion, and actively guide religion to adopt socialism.