When Sr. Mary Rose Mukuki-bogo first approached women in Gisagara, southern Rwanda, about starting an agricultural associa-tion, they were furious. It was 1997, three years after the 100-day genocide in 1994 that killed more than a million people during the fighting and the chaos afterwards. Mukukibogo, a member of Les Soeurs Auxiliatrices (Helpers of the Holy Souls), remembers walking from house to house in the district near the southern city of Butare, asking them if they’d like to join a farming cooperative. “They said to me, ‘I don’t understand how you can ask us to stand up,’ “ said Mukukibogo. “We have lost everyone. How can you ask us to stand?” In 1994, Rwanda lost 13%  of its population in the course of a single season, the result of a civil uprising between the Hutu, a peasant majority, and the Tutsi, the minority ruling class. After the genocide, infra-structure lay in ruins. The rural farmers, who had barely eked out a living before the killing, found themselves thrust deeper into poverty. Most men of working age had been killed, were imprisoned or fled to neighboring states as refugees, making economic recovery even more challenging. “It was very difficult for them to do any type of activity, because their spirit was so low,” recalled Mukuki-bogo, a genocide victim herself who lost multiple siblings in the genocide. “I started to accompany them to have hope in life.” Rwanda is a communal society, and farming associations have been a part of community life for hundreds of years, through “Ubudehe,” or mutual field cultivation. Slowly, Mukukibogo built a group of genocide victims, all of whom had lost their husbands, to start farming together.

On 10 July, the seminarians in a house of formation in the Ahiara diocese woke as usual; but their morning prayer was anything but routine. The atmosphere was like a graveyard. The deadline given by Pope Francis for all the priests of the diocese to pledge obedience to him and apologise for their rejection of the appointment of Peter Okpalaeke as their bishop had passed the previous day.

The 40 or so seminarians had one prayer intention that morning: that the situation in the diocese be resolved quickly, so that they could finally be ordained, five years after some of them had completed their formation. Exactly two weeks after the 30-day papal ultimatum to all Ahiara Catholic priests to apologise and accept Peter Okpalaeke as their bishop, the 529-member Ahiara Diocese Worldwide Laity Council has written another letter to Pope Francis, praying for justice and protection from a “rapacious predator.” The latest letter dated Sunday, July 23, 2017, was signed by 529 members of a global network of Catholics with roots and or relationships traceable to the Ahiara Presbyterium, of Nigeria, constituted to promote the social and pastoral health of members and the Diocese, using all resources available to them globally. Entitled: “We pray to you for justice, for a Bishop Incardinated in our Presbyterium—We Have Been Taken Advantage of, as Orphans,” the letter openly accused Emeritus Francis Cardinal Arinze of being behind the oppression of “orphan diocese,” and passionately pleaded with the Catholic Pontiff to deliver them from miscarriage of justice. According to the signatories, “it is against this background, that we collectively raise our clenched fists in prayer to you, to give us justice, to protect your ‘orphan diocese’ from the rapacious predator who, like a proverbial king of the world, would stump at an ant to deny it microscopic crumbs.

While Rome reels from one of its worst droughts in decades, the Vatican is doing its part to conserve water by shutting down the city-state’s 100 fountains. The office governing Vatican City State announced July 25 that the drought has “led the Holy See to take measures aimed at saving water” by shutting down fountains in St. Peter’s Square, throughout the Vatican Gardens and in the territory of the state.

In a tribute to the late Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI praised the German prelate for his “conviction that the Lord does not leave His Church, even if at times the ship is almost filled to the point of shipwreck.”

The message from the retired Pontiff, which was read out at Cardinal Meisner’s funeral by Archbishop Georg Ganswein, suggested that Benedict saw the Church as enduring a time of crisis.
In a candid passage of his message, Benedict wrote:

“What struck me particularly in the last conversations with the Cardinal, now gone home, was the natural cheerfulness, the inner peace and the assurance he had found. We know that it was hard for him, the passionate shepherd and pastor of souls, to leave his office, and this precisely at a time when the Church had a pressing need for shepherds who would oppose the dictatorship of the zeitgeist, fully resolved to act and think from a faith standpoint. Yet I have been all the more impressed that in this last period of his life he learned to let go, and live increasingly from the conviction that the Lord does not leave his Church, even if at times the ship is almost filled to the point of shipwreck.