READ

Browse past isues

DONATE

Help the mission

SHOP

Support the mission

CONTACT

Get in touch

Menu
Login

Category: World Touch

Church Fails To Follow Population Growth

The statistics do not distinguish between the government-approved and “underground” Church communities. The report states that figures for the latter may not be entirely accurate due to the difficulties involved in getting information. The FICS spent three months gathering information through e-mails, phone calls, faxes and personal interviews. The report says there are now 628 seminarians studying in 10 major seminaries plus another 630 in 30 minor seminaries. There are a total of 5,451 nuns from 106 congregations, and only 350 Religious men. The survey also lists more than 400 Church-run organizations, including schools, research institutes, publishing houses, medical facilities and homes for the aged and orphans. A Church observer, using the pen name “Dade,” says the survey shows how small the number of Catholics still is compared to China’s 1.3 billion people. He says the Church needs to evangelize more for its overall development. Dade, whose views were posted on the website of Hebei Faith Press, noted that there were more than 3 million Catholics out of a 500-million-strong population in 1949, when the Communists took power. Over a span of 60 years, the number of Catholics has not even doubled, he said. Dade added that Church communities had not made evangelization a priority over the decades, but had instead engaged in disputes, thus missing opportunities for growth. However, statistics compiled by Hong Kong diocese’s Holy Spirit Study Centre (HSSC) in 2008 show a marked difference from FICS’ figures. HSSC puts the number of mainland Catholics at about 12 million last year, more than double the figure given by FICS. Anthony Lam Sui-ki, HSSC’s senior researcher, said his institute began collecting data from mainland dioceses in 1988, and there has always been a marked difference between its figures and the mainland Church’s official figures.    

www.ucanews.com

Tallest Skyscraper In The World

Recently, Abu Dhabi came to the rescue of Dubai with over 10 billion dollars to cover part of the debts it had accumulated. Inaugurating the building, Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, said: “This great project deserves to bear the name of a great man. Today I inaugurate the Burj Khalifa.”  The new tower, with its 160 floors, is home to 1,044 luxury apartments, 49 floors of office space and an Armani hotel of 160 rooms, a mosque (on the 158th fl), and the highest swimming pool (76th fl) in the planet. The project was started in 2004, by 12 thousand workers. Built in record time, it represents the dream of Dubai in wanting to be a cosmopolitan metropolis and a world financial centre of luxury and wealth. Its opening in the midst of a global economic crisis is bringing losses to all investors, given that the value of their properties in Dubai has fallen by up to 50%.  Mohammed Alabbar, head of Emaar, the company responsible for the Burj, says that the building brings “hope and optimism.” “I hope that this is the beginning of a gradual move forward [beyond the crisis].” But many think that, with the ongoing crisis and the global problems of climate change, the Burj is just a monument to excess and waste.     

www.asianews.it and Agencies

Megacities

In 1950, only 14.5% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa lived in the city. In 1980, this percentage increased to 28% and in 1990 to 34%. It is expected that, by 2020, 50% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa will be urbanized and in 2025, this figure will be at 60%. In 1960, Johannesburg was the only city in sub-Saharan Africa with a population of over one million inhabitants. In 1970, there were 4 cities with over one million inhabitants: Cape Town, Johannesburg (both in South Africa), Kinshasa (in the then Zaire, now Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Lagos (Nigeria).  In the late 80s, Abidjan (Ivory Coast, Accra (Ghana), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dakar (Senegal), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Durban (South Africa), East Rand (South Africa, is now part of the vast metropolitan area of Johannesburg), Harare (Zimbabwe), Ibadan (Nigeria), Khartoum (Sudan), Luanda (Angola) and Nairobi (Kenya) joined the list. In 2010, it is estimated that at least 33 African cities have a population of over 1 million inhabitants.  In 2015, it is estimated that Lagos will have 23 million people, becoming the third megalopolis of the world after Tokyo and Bombay. The capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, which in 1940 had a population of 50,000 inhabitants, has now become the 23rd most populous city in the world, with 10 million inhabitants.  Even smaller cities are rapidly expanding. In Kenya, for example, in 1962 there were 34 cities. In 1999, there were 177. In Malawi, the percentage of urban population has grown from 5% in 1960 to 13% in 1995. Seventy-five percent of the urban population resides in the major cities of Blantyre, Lilongwe, Mzuzu, and Zomba. The growth rate of urban population is 5.6% per year.    

www.fides.org

A Continent Increasingly Urbanized

This development will have dramatic consequences, particularly because – according to data from UN-Habitat, a United Nations agency based in Nairobi, Kenya which deals with urban settlements – currently, two thirds of Africa’s population lives in urban slums or at least in “informal” conditions, without running water, sewerage, transport systems and adequate sanitation. The agency predicts that, by 2030, the African population will mainly live in urban settings rather than in the countryside. Therefore, there must be a serious prospect of living offered to young people in slums who are uprooted from traditional African culture and likely to fall into the temptation of crime or even terrorism. The rapid and chaotic urbanization is creating serious environmental hazards with serious consequences on the health of the inhabitants of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Among the risk factors, we can count contaminated water, lack of sanitation, air pollution, and the proliferation of disease-carrying insects. These problems are exacerbated by the use of chemicals in agriculture and industry. In addition to the diseases that have traditionally affected the African people (tuberculosis, AIDS or malaria), other diseases typical of industrialized countries such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and asthma are also spreading, as a result of pollution.  From the standpoint of urban development, it should be noted that a large number of African cities were developed in colonial times as administrative centers and for trade, not as modern industrial and services centers designed to accommodate a large population. Consequently, several African cities have a structure based on a center with neighborhoods for the wealthy, for businesses, and for the government, surrounded by slums. This presents a challenge for the Church and mission in Africa, where there have long been examples of missionary witness in the world’s poorest slums, like those in Nairobi.  

www.fides.org

Stamp For Mother Teresa

Her humility and compassion, as well as her respect for the innate worth and dignity of humankind, inspired people of all ages and backgrounds to work on behalf of the world’s poorest populations. Mother Teresa died in Calcutta in 1997, and is buried there. She had been a citizen of India since 1948.  In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress awarded Mother Teresa honorary American citizenship. The honor has only been bestowed on five others: Winston Churchill received it in 1963, Raoul Wallenberg in 1981, William Penn and Hannah Callowhill Penn in 1984, and the Marquis de Lafayette in 2002. The stamp features a portrait of Mother Teresa painted by award-winning artist Thomas Blackshear II of Colorado Springs.  

WM

Treasures Of Secret Archives Revealed

High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have been published in a book. The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots.  The book documents the Catholic Church’s often hostile dealings with the world of science and of arts, including documents from the heresy trial against Galileo and correspondence exchanged with Erasmus, Voltaire and Mozart.  In a letter dated 1246 from Grand Khan Güyük to Pope Innocent IV, Genghis Khan’s grandson demands that the pontiff travel to central Asia in person – with all of his “kings” in tow – to “pay service and homage to us” as an act of “submission,” threatening that otherwise “you shall be our enemy.” The book also includes letters written to Hitler by Pope Pius XI in 1934 and one received by his controversial successor, Pius XII, from Japan’s Emperor Hirohito.  “An aura of mystery has always surrounded this important cultural institution of the Holy See due to the allusions to inaccessible secrets,” Cardinal Raffaele Farina, a Vatican archivist, writes in the preface to the book, which was produced by a Belgian publisher. Although scholars have had access to the archives since 1881, they remain closed to the public.   

WM

Increase In Number Of Missionaries Killed

Over the past 10 years, 261 Catholic workers have been killed around the world, including 190 priests and four bishops. In December, Pope Benedict condemned the recent deaths of four monks in a number of African countries. Among them was 70-year-old French priest Louis Blondel (photo), who was killed during a burglary at his home in a shanty town north of Johannesburg, South Africa. 

WM

The Nagoya Protocol

The scale of the destruction can only be truly appreciated when viewed from the perspective of biological time. The last period such an extinction spasm happened was 65 million years ago at the end of the Mesozoic (Middle Life) era. Most researchers agree that the Mesozoic Era ended, at least in part, because of the impact of an asteroid in what is now the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. The current extinction is not due to external factors, but to one creature within the biosphere – humankind. We do not set out directly to cause the extinction of other species. However, our increasing number and escalating demands have led to widespread deforestation, the conversion of many habitats to agricultural land, the over exploitation of many species, especially in the oceans. All of these have had a devastating impact on the rest of life on earth. The Convention on Biodiversity emerged from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The objective is to protect biodiversity and to ensure that there is a fair and equitable distribution of any financial benefits derived from biological and genetic resources. The Nagoya meeting wrestled with these questions and ratified the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits (ABS). Initially, governments from the global North and especially Northern biotech and pharmaceutical corporations were opposed to sharing the benefits of biological resources with countries from the global South, where the biological and genetic resources originated. They feared that lawsuits might be brought against them for some products which they developed based on biological resources from countries in the South. Under the Nagoya Protocol, a multi-billion dollar fund will be set up to compensate countries in the Global South for any benefits which accrue from the commercial use of their biological resources. The Protocol is potentially worth billions of dollars to countries which are rich in biodiversity and could act as an incentive for them to protect the biodiversity of their forests and marine resources.  The Nagoya meeting also drew up a strategic plan to conserve biodiversity in the period between 2010 and 2020. The delegates from the 193 countries agreed to protect 17% of the land area of the world and 10% of the oceans by 2020. At the moment, about 13% of the land area of the world and only 1% of the oceans are protected areas. Details of the roadmap to achieve the above targets by 2020 are quite vague and critics say that the targets are not ambitious enough.  In all of these discussions, the cost of commitments is always close to the surface. Unfortunately, richer countries were slow to produce their checkbooks at Nagoya. The paucity of financial resources to protect biodiversity led Jim Leape, the director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), to complain that: “We were disappointed that most rich countries came to Nagoya with empty pockets – unable or unwilling to provide the resources that will make it

Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC

After The Massacre, The “Dilemma”

Fr. Vincent, who has lived in Iraq for 40 years and teaches at Babel College in Baghdad, the college affiliated with the Pontifical Urban University, has issued a heartfelt testimony: “We are living something that is really terrible. There had never been a massacre of such magnitude, all within a church during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. I have visited the church and listened to the testimonies of the faithful in shock. The terrorists mercilessly killed women and children. The community is traumatized. The church looked like a cemetery.”During the massacre, the Christian community in Baghdad has lost two young Syro-Catholic priests, Fr. Wasim Sabieh and Fr. Thaier Saad Abdal (gravely wounded, a third priest, Chorepiscop Fr. Rufail Quataimi, died later in the hospital). “What a tragedy! The two priests, not yet in their thirties, were my students at the Babel College. They were very active in Bible apostolate, in interfaith dialogue, and charity. Fr. Thaier was in charge of a Center for Islamic Studies, and Fr. Wasin was very involved in helping poor families. We will miss them,” says Fr. Vincent. The Redemptorist recalls that days later “a number of attacks hit Baghdad and Shiite areas, which means that not only Christians are under attack, but the whole area is flooded by terrorism. It is hard to see a hopeful future for the nation right now,” he says. “We do not know who is behind these acts, nor where the nation is headed. Meanwhile, the people suffer. There are such great evils that beset the country.” Hence, the dilemma for Christians: “The faithful say their life has become impossible. Many Christian families are organizing themselves to leave the country. The excruciating dilemma is whether to flee in search of a better future, or stay, risking their lives. In this tragic moment, the bishops have a great responsibility to speak to the faithful, to give them reasons and hopes, to convince them to stay. The task of our pastors, today, is very difficult,” he remarked. The funeral of the victims “was attended by many Muslim leaders who asked the government to defend Christians. We hope that, after yet another massacre, civil authorities listen to the cry of Christians in Iraq and place an end to their suffering.”  On the occasion of the funeral, celebrated on November 2, the Holy Father Benedict XVI sent the following message to Archbishop Athanase Matti Shaba Matoka, Archbishop of Baghdad for the Syro-Catholics: “Deeply moved by the violent death of so many faithful and their priests Tha’ir Saad and Boutros Wasim, I wish, during the sacred funeral rite, to share spiritually on this occasion and pray that these our brothers and sisters are welcomed by the mercy of Christ into the Father’s House. For years, this country has been suffering untold hardships and even Christians have become the subject of brutal attacks that, in total disregard of life – an inviolable gift from God – seek to undermine confidence and peace. I renew my

www.fides.org

Catholic Seminary Opens After 50 Years

The new formation center was built in the Archdiocese of San Cristobal de la Havana and as planned, it will be attended by a hundred students. The first stone of the religious building was blessed by Pope John Paul II during a Mass celebrated in Havana on January 25, 1998, at the end of his historic visit to the island, but construction work has begun just recently, when the Cuban government began to show a more tolerant attitude towards the Catholic Church. The construction of the seminary was mainly financed by the Order of the Knights of Columbus in the United States of America. The international press, as well as local and foreign analysts, have noted that the Church has begun to play an increasingly significant role in the social life of the country. On July 7 of this year, thanks to the efforts of the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, Cuban authorities released 52 political dissidents and allowed them to leave the country. In addition, the Catholic Church has repeatedly called for a liberalization of political and economic life in the country.  

www.fides.org
Load More

Cart/₱0.00
Shopping Cart