Indian police have arrested a Protestant pastor and his wife for allegedly indulging in religious conversions, say Christian leaders.
Police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where a sweeping anti-conversion law is in force, arrested Pastor Santosh John and his wife, Jiji John, on Feb. 26 based on a complaint by Bajrang Dal, an ultra-Hindu outfit.
“Pastor John and his wife were summoned in the morning for questioning and were freed later in the evening. But they were arrested after a mob protested in front of the police station,” Minakshi Singh, a Christian activist, told UCA News on Feb. 28.
John and his wife were holding a prayer service in a rented basement in Indrapuram in Uttar Pradesh near India’s capital New Delhi when the mob created a ruckus and accused them of religious conversion.
The couple appeared before a magistrate on Feb. 28 and were denied bail.
Singh, general secretary of Unity in Compassion, a charity based in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, said, “Pastor John and his wife are lodged in the Dasana jail in Uttar Pradesh.”
Police came under pressure from the administration, headed by Yogi Adityanath of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the Bajrang Dal, which is affiliated to the parent organization of the BJP, said Singh, who was seeking legal aid for the couple.
“Why should they arrest the pastor and his wife without any evidence?”
Former bureaucrats urge Modi to denounce attacks on Christians
As many as 93 former civil servants have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about what they assay are recent increase in attacks on Christians in India.
Banded under the Constitutional Conduct Group, the retired bureaucrats, urged Modi in their March 4 open letter to reassure Chri-stians in the country that it will get equal and unbiased treatment from administration and the law.
“We are a group of former civil servants of the All India and Central Services who have worked in the Central and State Govern-ments during our careers. As a group, we have no affiliation with any political party but believe in impartiality, neutrality and share a commitment to the Constitution of India,” says the opening of the letter.
The bureaucrats say they write to the prime minister because they are “deeply perturbed” by the continued harassment, through speech and criminal action, of minority groups in the country by persons associated with your government, your party, organizations connected to it, and by mischief makers from amongst the public.
“While we are concerned about the hate crimes and speeches against all minorities, we write to you today about the steadily in-creasing ugly words and actions against a small religious minority, the Christians. Our Constitution clearly spells out that all citizens, irrespective of religion, are equal and have equal rights, but we are compelled to protest to you against the increasing incidents of outright discrimination against Christians occurring in recent times,” the letter adds.
The letter points out that although some groups accuse Christians of indulging forcible religious conversion, the community share in the Indian popular has remained around 2.3 percent since 1951.
“Yet, in the minds of some, this minuscule number poses a threat to the 80 percent of the population that is Hindu,” says the letter.
The accusation has made Christians and their institutions victims of verbal, physical and psychological attacks in various parts of the country. “It is an unfortunate but inesca-pable fact that there are elements amongst us who may feel that the denigration of others enhances themselves,” the letter bemoans.
Noting the contributions of Christians to the education and health sectors and social reform, the former civil servants said that India has been home to “Christianity since the first century CE, long before its intro-duction in many countries that are today predominantly Christian.”
Myanmar Church speaks out against rare earth mining
Church leaders in Myanmar are up in arms against unregulated mining for rare earth elements — widely used in the production of high-tech devices like smartphones, computers, electric vehicles and solar cells — in the conflict-torn Southeast Asian nation’s Kachin state.
Mining for rare earth has increased sharply in northern mineral-rich Kachin state, bordering China’s Yunnan province, following the toppling of Myanmar’s civilian government by the military on Feb.1, 2021. “We are concerned about the effects of environmental degradation, the livelihoods of local communities and the wellbeing of animals due to the extraction of rare earth,” said Church leaders from Banmaw diocese in Kachin state, where unregulated rare earth mining is in full swing by Chinese firms and others. In a letter, signed by Bishop Raymond Sumlut Gam and four other diocesan leaders, including the vicar general and the chancellor, on March 4, they said rare earth minerals are a gift from God so “we have the responsibility to protect them.”
HK bishop to visit Beijing seeking exchanges, interaction
Hong Kong’s Catholic bishop is scheduled to visit Beijing next month at the invitation of the archbishop based in the Chinese capital to promote exchanges and interactions between Catholics in the two regions of China, an official statement said.
Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-yan of Hong Kong accepted the invitation from Archbishop Joseph Li Shan of Beijing and will spend five days in Beijing from April 17, Hong Kong Diocese said in a March 9 statement.
Chow accepted the invitation “in the spirit of brotherhood in the Lord,” the statement said.
Chow, a Jesuit, said his visit “underscores the mission of the Diocese of Hong Kong to be a bridge Church and promote exchanges and interactions between the two sides.”
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Ha, vicar general Father Peter Choy, and the bishop’s assistant Wong Ka-Chun will accompany Chow during his visit to Beijing.
In addition to the meeting with Li, Chow and the team will also meet with other local bishops, clergy, and laity during this trip, said the statement published on the Hong Kong diocesan website, the Sunday Examiner.
The team will also visit the Beijing Major Seminary, the national seminary of the Catholic Church in China, and other relevant institutions concerning religious affairs.
Upon arriving in Beijing, the bishop will participate in the evening prayers and celebrate a thanksgiving mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Beijing.
The prelate’s travel will also include a visit to the tomb of Italian Jesuit missionary Father Matteo Ricci, who was recently declared venerable.
The team is also scheduled to visit organizations that promote cultural exchanges and hold gatherings with “Hong Kong friends working in Beijing,” the Sunday Examiner reported.
Critics of the deal say it is a “betrayal” of Catholics who remained loyal to the Vatican despite persecution.
Despite the criticism, Pope Francis said that he wants to continue “dialogue” with China despite the challenges.
Korean Catholics seek more counselling to curb suicides
Experts and Catholic groups in South Korea have called for more psychotherapy centres and counsellors and urged the Church to promote counselling as part of pastoral care amid a rise in suicide rates.
“[Pastoral] counselling should be added to sacramental pastoral care,” said Father Matthew Hong Sung-nam, director of the Catholic Psycho-Spiritual Counselling Centre of Seoul archdiocese.
He added that “the Church intervenes in people’s lives from birth to death and takes care of them. Similarly, pastoral centres of the Church should try to solve the problem.”
Pastoral counselling is a unique form of psychotherapy that uses spiritual resources as well as psychological understanding for healing and growth, according to the American Association of Pastoral Counselling. It is provided by certified pastoral counselors, who are not only mental health professionals but have also had in-depth religious and/or theological training.
“The demand for psychological support has increased remarkably”
According to a Covid-19 National Mental Health Survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in August last year, the number of those admitting having suicidal thoughts had increased nearly threefold from 4.6 percent in 2019 to 12.7 percent in June 2022.
Catholicism ‘most trusted religion’ in South Korea
The Catholic Church in South Korea is the most trusted religious group on the peninsula, according to a recent survey.
Among those surveyed, 21.4 % of respondents revealed that they had more trust in Catholicism in comparison to other religions in the country.
The “2023 Korean Church Social Trust Survey” was conducted by G&Com Research on behalf of the Christian Ethics Practice Movement from Jan. 11 to 15 among 1,000 men and women over 19 years of age.
According to the survey, Protestantism came second with 16.5 % of respondents supporting it, while Buddhism occupied the third spot with 15.7 %.
However, in comparison to 2020 data, the overall reliability of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Buddhism declined.
The survey report was released on Feb. 16, at the 100th Anniversary Memorial Hall of Korean Churches in Seoul.
Catholics obtained the top spot with 29.4 % in terms of the volume or number of social support activities conducted. Protestants came in second with 20.6 % whereas Buddhists were third with 6.8%.
Catholicism also maintained the top spot in terms of the quality of social support services it provides to people.
In a 2020 survey, Protestantism occupied the top spot in this category.
Among the respondents, 26.7 percent felt that Catholic social support services offered good quality. Protestants came in second at 19.8 percent and Buddhists at 9.8 percent.
Ecclesial assembly showed great promise for Asian churches
The Second Vatican Council’s document Lumen Gentium (light of the nations) clearly taught that the Church consists of all the baptized, not just the clergy.
The return to this conciliar concept surely is a powerful antidote to the recent discoveries of clerical domination and abuse in almost all spheres of ecclesial life.
In fact, the unprecedented opposition to this papal initiative even from within the Church — mostly from a powerful lobby of a vociferous clerical minority — is a clear sign that they are set to lose all the undue and excessive power and authority they had been used to wielding unjustly over the laity within the Church.
One characteristic of the current worldwide synodal process is to get all the baptized — the bishops, priests, religious and laity — involved in the ecclesial decision-making processes.
The unprecedented consultation of the baptized at grassroots levels on crucially important ecclesial issues was modeled for the harnessing of the sensus fidei fidelium (the sense of the faith of the believers) as it was done in the early Christian communities as we find in the New Testament, especially in the Acts of the Apostles.
This consultation — in the form of a questionnaire — thus, was uniquely novel in the sense that it was a process that began from the lowest rungs of the Church hierarchy — from the parish or ecclesial communities spread all over the world.
Those responses of the ecclesial grassroots were collected and sent to Rome by the bishops’ conferences in each country by August 2022.
It was this CSD that was sent to the seven zones of the world known as “continents”, namely, North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Oceania for further discussion and discernment.
The two-day Asian continental stage of the synodal process concluded on Feb. 26 at Samphran, Thailand with an ecclesial assembly consisting of delegates from all the episcopal conferences of Asia.
asteroids named after three Jesuits and a Pope
These are the names of the four asteroids named after three astronomers from the Vatican Observatory, and Pope Gregory XIII.
Pope Gregory, who was born Ugo Boncompagni, is the Pope to whom we owe the reform of the calendar (later known as the Gregorian Calendar) and the beginning of the tradition of papal astronomers and observatories. The astronomers after whom three celestial bodies have been named are the Jesuits Johann Hagen, who was director of the Vatican Observatory from 1906 to 1930, Bill Stoeger, cosmologist and theologian, and Robert Janusz, currently on the staff of the Vatican Observatory.
10 years of Pope Francis: Significantly more women working at the Vatican
There are currently 1,165 female employees working for the Pope, compared to only 846 in the year Francis took office in 2013. The percentage of women in the total workforce at the Vatican rose in the current pontificate from just under 19.2 to 23.4 per cent today. These figures refer to the two administrative units Holy See and Vatican City State together.
The increase in female employees is even more pronounced if one looks exclusively at the Holy See, i.e. the Roman Curia. Here, the proportion of women has risen from 19.3 to 26.1 per cent over the past ten years. This means that more than one in four employees at the Holy See is now a woman – in absolute figures 812 out of 3,114.
In the ten-part salary scale used in the Vatican, most women in the Curia have been found for many years on the sixth and seventh step. They thus exercise professions that usually require an academic degree, such as lawyers, department heads, archivists or administrative specialists. In 2022, 43% of the women employed at the Curia worked at the sixth and seventh levels.
Secretaries and undersecretaries are the second and third levels of management respectively in most curia authorities and are part of the management team together with the prefect, i.e. the superior of the authority; all three levels are filled by appointment by the Pope. At the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Pope Francis appointed a female secretary for the , the Italian religious Alessandra Smerilli. It is the highest post ever held by a woman at the Holy See.
German bishops’ leader rejects Vatican caution on Synodal Council
Bishop Georg Bätzing has told reporters that the German bishops’ conference will proceed with the formation of a Synodal Council, despite clear opposition from the Vatican.
Bishop Bätzing, the president of the episcopal conference, said that the Synodal Council—composed of bishops and lay people, and tasked with setting policies for the Church in Germany—would be formed this month.
In a terse letter to three leading Vatican cardinal, the German bishops’ leader did not directly address the Vatican’s warning that the proposed Council would violate the proper authority of diocesan bishops. Instead he said that the German bishops would be happy to meet with Vatican officials to “clarify” the role of the new group as it develops.
The letter from Bishop Bätzing was addressed to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State; Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops; and Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.