Catholic Church in India petitioned the Supreme Court to protect Christians
New Delhi, India, Sep 4, 2008 - The Catholic Church in India has petitioned the country's Supreme Court to protect Christian lives and property in Orissa state.Archbishop Raphael Cheenath of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar told the Asian church news agency UCA News Sept. 2 that the church decided to approach the highest court "as we are not getting sufficient response" from the Orissa government.
The archbishop, whose archdiocese is in Orissa, said the church wants the court to order federal authorities to protect Christians in the eastern state.
"We want some clear help and response" from the government, added the archbishop, who has stayed in New Delhi since the violence broke out in Orissa Aug. 24.
The church petition seeks the deployment of sufficient riot police in villages where Hindu extremists continue to destroy churches and Christian buildings. It also demands that the Central Bureau of Investigation, the country's criminal investigative agency, probe the violence.
In addition to its regular judicial duties, the Supreme Court of India can take action if individuals file a petition with a question of public importance that needs the court's involvement.
Archbishop Cheenath said the attacks have now decreased, since "there are no more targets to attack." But in several villages Christians reportedly have been forced to sign documents declaring they are Hindus and have been asked to destroy their churches and other Christians' houses afterward.
The archbishop told UCA News all Christian institutions have been destroyed in the Kandhamal district, the worst-hit area of Orissa. The violence began there after suspected Maoists gunned down an 85-year-old Hindu religious leader and five associates Aug. 23. Hindu radicals targeted Christians, claiming they had masterminded the killings.
A probe into the situation by the Central Bureau of Investigation is necessary because "there seems a hide-and-seek game" in the whole matter, especially regarding the Hindu leader's killing, said the archbishop.
"Let the truth come out and the guilty be punished," he said.
The state government has ordered a judicial probe, but the archbishop said the church suspects this report would be biased against Christians.
The church also wants India's National Human Rights Commission to study the Orissa violence. He recalled that the commission went to Orissa when Christians were attacked in Kandhamal last Christmas, but the state administration did not allow commission members to visit the affected villages.
Archbishop Cheenath said the church petition also asks that individuals be compensated for their losses, such as $9,000 for fully destroyed homes and half that amount for damaged homes.
He welcomed media reports about the prime minister promising relief packages and compensation from his emergency fund for the Orissa victims.
"But all this should be implemented in reality," he added.
Archbishop Cheenath said he sees the attacks as the fruit of "hate campaigns" Hindu radical groups have carried out in Orissa for the past 25 to 30 years. People "are poisoned and have lost their capacity to think correctly," he added.
Political parties allowed the radical groups to grow for the parties' vested interests, and "now they can't control them," he said.
- CNS
Chinese Catholic bishop was arrested after Olympic
Beijing, Aug. 25, 2008 - China's most prominent "underground" Catholic bishop was arrested on Sunday, August 24: the day that also saw the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing.
Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo of Zhengding was taken into custody by several police officers at Wuqiu cathedral. No immediate reason was given for his arrest, and authorities have not disclosed where the aging bishop is being held.
The 73-year-old Bishop Jia, who heads an active diocese of over 100,000 Catholics in the Hebei diocese, spent 15 years in prison, from 1963 to 1978. Since his release he has been re-arrested at least 12 times; ordinarily he has been detained for a few days of interrogation each time. He has been living under house arrest since 1989.
During the Olympic Games, Chinese Christians had been warned not to organize public worship. About 1,000 Catholics in Zhengding defied those orders to join Bishop Jia for a Mass celebrating the feast of the Assumption at Wuqiu cathedral on August 15. Chinese officials-- particularly in the Hebei diocese, where the underground Catholic Church is strong-- have a history of arresting Christian leaders just before and after major public events such as Communist party congresses. The Olympic Games brought a series of warnings against "unauthorized" religious activity, and AsiaNews has noted that some members of the underground Church predicted a crackdown immediately after the Olympics, when media attention decreased.
- CWNews.com
Indian Catholic missionaries raped, killed
Bhubaneshwar, India, Aug.26,2008 (vaticans.org) - An orphanage run by Catholic missionaries has been burnt by Hindu extremists killing one woman while another was raped, reports from India say.
The International Herald Tribune quotes a senior police officer as saying the woman who died was most likely a lay employee giving computer training to children at the orphanage not a nun as reported earlier.
"Police are investigating. ... The woman most probably was not a nun," said Gopal Chandra Nanda, director general of state police, the most senior officer in the state.
The conflicting reports could not immediately be reconciled. George Abraham, secretary to the archbishop of Delhi, said the identity of the woman had not yet been confirmed because the orphanage was in a remote area.
The attack occurred in Khuntapali, a village in Orissa state, during a strike called by the World Hindu Council to protest the killing Saturday of a Hindu religious leader and four others by suspected communist rebels in another district of the state, Ashok Biswal, superintendent of police, told The Associated Press.
Biswal said on Monday a group of Hindu hardliners converged on the orphanage in Khuntapali, nearly 400 kilometres west of the state capital of Bhubaneshwar, and asked nearly 20 residents to leave the complex.
They then set the orphanage on fire with the woman and priest locked inside, he said.
The woman died and the priest was hospitalised with serious burns, Biswal said.
AsiaNews says that tensions in Orissa are still running high.
Source: Cathnews
Catholic leaders: Church must become a missionary community with a new mentality
Catholic leaders at an international mission conference for the Americas said the church must become a missionary community with a new mentality.
The message for conference participants was that "we have to get involved if we're going to be true to the Gospel of Christ and make a difference in the world in which we're living," Bishop Patrick J. Zurek of Amarillo, Texas, told Catholic News Service.
The Third American Missionary Congress drew more than 2,000 laypeople, bishops, priests and religious to Quito, Ecuador, Aug. 12-17 to discuss challenges for mission, from family life and fundamentalism to ecology and science. Several participants talked to CNS by telephone during and after the conference.
The closing Mass marked the official launch of the "great continental mission" that bishops from Latin America and the Caribbean announced in May 2007 during their fifth general conference in Aparecida, Brazil.
That mission must build on "a spirit that was begun in Aparecida, the spirit of mission, of discipleship," Auxiliary Bishop Octavio Cisneros of Brooklyn, N.Y., told CNS.
Sister Mary McGlone, president of the U.S. Catholic Mission Association and a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, said, "The challenge for mission for Latin America is to move beyond the boundaries of Latin America, to go out" to the world.
According to statistics on the congress Web site, South America sends 5,785 missionaries to other countries and receives 12,011.
Bishop Cisneros said that being a missionary church means not just sending missionaries to remote areas, but "realizing that we are all missionaries. Even in our own parishes, we have to become those who ... listen, learn" and proclaim the Gospel.
Speaking on the first day of the conference, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Mariadaga of Tegucigalpa said Catholics "must proclaim the good news of the kingdom in faithfulness and strength, especially because there are many who oppose it out of ambition for power, love of wealth or desire for pleasure."
The cardinal said disciples must "be willing to renounce all they have had until now, to carry out the mission of propagating the faith both within and beyond the borders of the country."
Cardinal Rodriguez said the Catholic Church in Latin America must reach out to people who "do not know the full manifestation of the love of God" incarnated in Jesus and must go beyond national borders "to the growing multitude of those who do not know Christ."
At the same time, he said, "as evangelizers, we are concerned about so many men and women who for various reasons ... have become strangers to the faith or to religious meaning."
At last year's meeting in Aparecida, the bishops expressed concern about both the headway made by evangelical groups in the region and the number of Catholics who have become unchurched. One goal of the continental mission is to invite Catholics back into the church.
Sister Mary said it is important to note that the bishops spoke of a "continental mission," not just a Latin American effort. That poses the "challenge of seeing how this experience of interchange can help us become one church in America," she said.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Latin American bishops' council, known as CELAM, work closely together in many areas. For the past decade, Bishop Zurek said, the prelates on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border have met several times a year to discuss common concerns, especially ministry to migrants.
However, the U.S. bishops have not yet established an office to coordinate the continental mission with Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, and it is not clear what form the effort will take.
Bishop Zurek said the continental mission should provide an opportunity to emphasize issues of common concern, such as migration, globalization and economic justice.
One challenge is to get Catholics in the United States "involved with the issues of South America," he said. "Can we make a difference with our government, in the sense of the way we do politics, or with our economic community, in the way we do business in Latin America, so that people will not have to leave to come and find work in our country?"
By including the U.S. and Canadian church leaders in the continental mission, he said, "we are saying we are one America, we are one family, we are one church."
Source: CNS
Pope Benedict XVI warned Catholics of the perils of pop culture
Sydney , July 17, 2008 - Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday warned Catholics of the perils of pop culture and pillaging the earth's resources after a rapturous welcome at the world's biggest Christian festival in Australia.
Speaking against the spectacular backdrop of Sydney's famous harbour, the pontiff told hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in Australia's biggest and trendiest city that "something is amiss" in modern society.
"Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises," the pope said after a welcoming ceremony by Aborigines in tribal paint.
Benedict told a vast sea of youths from around the world, gathered under a forest of national flags for World Youth Day, that humanity was squandering the earth's resources to satisfy its insatiable appetite for material goods.
In one of his strongest-ever messages on the environment , the pope spoke poetically of his 20-hour flight from Rome to Australia, saying the wondrous views from his plane evoked a profound sense of awe.
But the 81-year-old pontiff told his young audience that the planet's problems were also easier to perceive from the sky.
"Perhaps reluctantly, we come to acknowledge that there are scars which mark the surface of our earth -- erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world's mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption," he said.
Earlier, shouts of "Viva, Papa" rang out over the harbour as a "boat-a-cade" of 13 vessels led by a water-spouting fire tug and flanked by bodyguards on jet skis glided past Sydney's iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge en route to the pope's World Youth Day debut.
Benedict arrived in Sydney last Sunday, but took a four-day holiday before beginning his formal duties, which end with a papal mass expected to draw 500,000 people on Sunday.
Ahead of his public appearance, he was welcomed by Governor-General Michael Jeffery, the representative of Australia's head of state, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
In a brief speech at the ceremony at Sydney's Government House, the pontiff hailed Rudd's apology to Aborigines for past injustices in an historic address to parliament in February.
"Thanks to the Australian government's courageous decision to acknowledge the injustices committed against the indigenous peoples in the past, concrete steps are now being taken to achieve reconciliation based on mutual respect," Benedict said.
"This example of reconciliation offers hope to peoples all over the world who long to see their rights affirmed and their contribution to society acknowledged and promoted."
But there was some confusion over whether the pope would deliver an apology of his own -- to Australian victims of sex abuse by Catholic clergymen, as the scandal cast a shadow over the festival.
Benedict indicated to journalists on his plane on the way to Australia that he would apologise but a Vatican official late Wednesday raised doubts over the issue.
The angry parents of two Australian girls sexually abused by a Catholic priest urged Benedict not to back away from his apparent pledge to apologise.
"I can't really understand why they're backpedalling on that," said Anthony Foster, as he and his wife Christine flew into Sydney after cutting short a holiday in London.
The Fosters' daughter Emma committed suicide this year aged 26, after struggling to deal with abuse by a priest while she was at primary school.
Her sister Katie was also abused and turned to alcohol in her teens before being involved in a motor accident which left her brain-damaged.
Rudd, a committed Christian who attends Anglican services, told the pope that he was welcomed by Australians of all faiths "as an apostle of peace."
The pope later toured the city in his bullet-proof "popemobile" through thousands of cheering, flag-brandishing pilgrims and bemused locals heading home from work.
World Youth Day, a celebration of the Catholic faith aimed at rejuvenating the church, has been held in a different host city around the world every two or three years since 1986.
AFP