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August 2007
“The Church’s ministry to urban residents, especially the underserved and underrepresented of the suburbs, cannot be purely spiritual, ignoring their concrete needs.”
China’s Great Wall and the Taj Mahal in India are among the modern day seven wonders of the world in a poll of 100 million people online. The other five are Petra in Jordan, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Peru’s Machu Picchu, the mountain settlement that symbolizes the Incan empire, Mexico’s Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza and the Colosseum in Rome.
For the first time since 2002 the number of refugees in the world has increased. According to a report released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 9.9 million people forced to leave their countries by war, poverty and natural disasters by the end of 2006.
Benedict XVI has declared June 2008-June 2009 the year of St. Paul in celebration of the 2,000th anniversary of the saint’s birth. The Pope decreed the year in a vespers celebration held at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
The Holy See is appealing to the international community to adopt measures that will put an end to the bloodshed caused by cluster bombs. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s permanent observer to the U.N. offices in Geneva, made that appeal during a speech at the Convention on Conventional Weapons.
It is not every day that one sees a priest tinkering his way around an airplane, but that has been a regular sight for the last couple of years at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Thurgoona in southern NSW. A light aircraft has been built by Father John Fowles who hopes to fly it around Australia to raise money for those less fortunate in East Timor. He explains: “The ‘Fly Away to Heaven’ project is an initiative that is inspired by the idea of giving back. We have received many blessings in our parish here and now we feel there is a need to give back and help someone else. At the time, the cause for East Timor and the situation there came to my attention and I thought we should give something from here. The idea is to get sponsorships for flying various legs to circumnavigate around Australia in this little airplane. Also, it is a way of reaching out and making people aware of what we are doing.”
Those who have contributed least to the problems of climate change are the ones who will suffer its consequences the most, says an official from the U.S. Bishops’ Conference. John Carr, Secretary of the Bishops’ Panel on Social Development and World Peace, addressed a Senate committee with the message that the poor are those made most vulnerable by climate change.
Stripped of their dignity and deprived of their land, the poorest segments of the Indian population are getting nothing out of the country’s booming economy. Sometimes they are even forced to pay for it with their lives, according to Fr. Nithiya Sagayam, Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Justice, Peace and Development of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India.
The letter of Pope Benedict XVI to the Church in China is the beginning of a new phase, and one of the two most important and historical documents ever written by Rome to the Chinese Church. The key words are reconciliation, unity and dialogue.
Half of the world’s population is already living in the cities, a big part in overcrowded and miserable slums. Urban poverty and exclusion are growing fast and will be worse in the near future. Even the Pentagon is worried.
The world economy, driven as it is by neo-liberal economists and politicians, excludes 80% of the world’s population from gainful and humanly meaningful employment. Only 20% of workers in the world take pride in and meaningfully gain from their work. As an agent of mission, the Church needs to address the issues of globalization and its effects on human beings, especially in the cities.
In 2015, Metro Manila will have 15 million people and much more problems. One way to solve them is to have governments listen to the voice of the lower-income groups and allow them to participate in important decision-making processes. The Church also has an important role: it can intercede on behalf of the poor and help them form their organizations.
Nairobi has a population of 4 million inhabitants, 2.5 million of whom live in over 200 slums – covering less than 5% of the whole urban area. Indeed, the towns of the world need to hear the liberating Good News of Jesus Christ, as well as see a committed Christian community taking charge of social change, such as in this city.
Jesus called people to personal and community change, but He also called us to change the world. He was not only concerned with individual salvation, but He wanted a change of structures that impoverish, enslave and punish the poor.
In recent years changes have been brought about in the fields of economy, technology and communications that have transformed the face of work and the conditions of the labor market, at times in dramatic ways. One emerging tendency appears to favor more individualistic relations between enterprise and employees. The latter would protect their own rights on the bases of their skills and entrepreneurial ability. These developments may be calling on us to rethink current forms of solidarity. Although workers may no longer find themselves in physical proximity with each other, solidarity remains crucial and indispensable if founded on our common humanity that links all types of work.
Mostly in the hands of foreign companies, the flower farms in Kenya represent millions of euros in terms of exports. But the booming blooming industry has heavy costs to the workers.
He was himself a victim of the atomic bomb and became its mystic. This is the heart-rending story of Dr. Paul Takashi Nagai, who gave his life to the mission of making Christian sense of one of the greatest war tragedies of modern history.
If ever there is any single piece of evidence that illustrates the gross inequality in the Philippines, it is the treatment of those innocent children accused of crimes and rich politician behind bars. It is a rare once-in-a-life-time event when a rich politician is convicted and jailed for child sex abuse or any other serious crime. Thousands of innocent young people have been arrested, jailed and left to languish in prisons and police station jails with adult criminals and pedophiles in filthy conditions. So just to get one powerful Philippine politician behind bars to serve his sentence gives hope to victims.
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