The commission that now-retired Pope Benedict XVI established to study the alleged apparitions of Mary at Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, reportedly voted overwhelmi-ngly to recognise as supernatural the first seven appearances of Mary in 1981. However, according to a report published by the website Vatican Insider, the commission was much more doubtful about the thousands of alleged visions that have occurred since 4 July, 1981, and supposedly continue to this day.

Two of the 17 commission members and consultants thought the alleged visions after the period of June 24-July 3, 1981, were not supernatural, while the other members said it was not possible to make a judgment.

The commission said it was clear that the six alleged visionaries and a seventh who claims to have begun receiving messages from Mary in December 1982 were not given adequate spiritual support. Vatican Insider published its piece on the report on 16 May, three days after Pope Francis spoke about some details of the report to journalists travelling with him from Fatima, Portugal.
The Vatican press office declined to comment on the Vatican Insider piece today (17 May). Speaking to journalists on 13 May, Pope Francis said that, regarding the Medjugorje commission’s work, “three things need to be distinguished.”

“About the first apparitions, when (the ‘seers’) were young, the report more or less says that the investigation needs to continue,” the Pope said, according to the English translation posted on the Vatican website.

“Concerning the alleged current apparitions, the report expresses doubts,” he said. Furthermore, “personally, I am more ‘mischievous.’ I prefer Our Lady to be a mother, our mother, and not a telegraph operator who sends out a message every day at a certain time — this is not the mother of Jesus.” Pope Francis said his “personal opinion” is that “these alleged apparitions have no great value.”

Pope Francis gave the Catholic Church two of its youngest saints, canonizing shepherd siblings believed to have seen the Mado-nna 100 years ago in a Portuguese town that is now a major pilgrimage site.

Hundreds of, thousands of, people, many of whom slept outdoors to hold their places, broke into applause as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics proclaimed the siblings — Francisco and Jacinta Marto — the newest of the Church’s saints. The two died at the ages of 10 and 9 years old, within three years of the 1917 apparitions, making them the youngest saints of the Church who were not martyrs.

The Virgin of Fatima is venerated by Catholics around the world, a following underscored by the many national flags fluttering in the huge crowd, estimated at more than half a million. Marie Chantal, 57, a life-long devotee, travelled more than 9,000 km (5,600 miles) from the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean to attend the ceremony.

For four days from 24-28 May, the Kirchentag was one of the highlights of the Reformation Jubilee. Prominent religious leaders, politicians, economists and other well-known personalities, including former US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed Muhammad el-Tayyeb, spoke on and debated current social and political issues and thousands worshipped together and attended the many concerts and cultural events. Most of the prominent speakers deplored the recent terrorist attack in Manchester.

Standing in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate – which was cut off from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall during the 40-year Cold War and became the best known symbol of a divided Germany – Barack Obama called out to the crowds, “In this new world we live in, we can’t isolate ourselves, we can’t hide behind a wall.”

Strongly supported by Obama, Merkel defended her asylum policy. Pointing to the “dilemma” of the gulf between Christian compassion and Realpolitik, she once again underlined the importance of welcoming those in real need of protection but rejecting those who did not conform to asylum conditions.

Tymoteusz Szydlo, 25, son of Poland’s Prime Minister was ordained on Saturday May 27 in a ceremony attended by the Polish head of government and her family in the southern city of Bielsko-Biala. Prime Minister Szydlo’s other son, 23-year-old Blazej, is a medical student.

Within the next 10-20 years, a new and controversial fertility technology called in vitro gametogenesis could make it possible to manipulate skin cells into creating a human baby. However, this groundbreaking research has caused push-back from some critics, like Fr Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Centre, who says IVG would turn procreation into a transaction.

“IVG extends the faulty logic of IVF by introducing additional steps to the process of manipulating the origins of the human person, in order to satisfy the desires of customers and consumers,” Fr Pacholczyk told CNA in an email interview.

“The technology also offers the possibility of introducing further fractures into parenthood, distancing children from their parents by multiplying the number of those involved in generating the child, so that 3-parent embryos, or even more parents, may become involved,” he continued.

However, Fr Pachol-czyk hopes that potential parents will come to realize that children should not products that can be ordered or purchased by consumers, and should rather be seen as a gift. “Turning commer-cial laboratories to crea-te children on our behalf is an unethical step in the direction of treating our offspring as objects to be planned and created in the pursuit of parental grati-fication, rather than gifts received from the Lord.”

Paris turned off the lights of the Eiffel Tower at 12:45AM on May 27 to pay tribute to the victims of the attack in Egypt’s Minya that left at least 28 people dead. The symbolic blackout of the monument was announced by the Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on Friday, May 26  night from her Twitter account, Efe news reported.

Hidalgo lamented that the Christian community in Egypt was again the target of a barbaric and cowardly attack, adding that her thoughts are with the victims and their families. On May 26 night, the Eiffel Tower was shut down from 12.45 AM (local time) as a sign of sympathy to Egyptian Copts, said her second tweet.