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Category: World Touch

Fighting The Exodus And Spiritual Extinction

The Synod of the Catholic Church for the Middle East concerns Arab and non-Arab countries that spread over a vast geographical area from Egypt to Turkey, from Iran to Israel and right through to the Gulf, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Cyprus. It includes, directly or indirectly, 14 million Christians in a population of 330 million inhabitants, among whom we find Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Greeks and Jews. This synod will focus on this very complex and diverse situation. It’s true that, in these last years, we have seen a Synod for Lebanon and another for the Holy Land. One might feel entitled then to pose the following question: “Instead of so ambitious a synod for the entire Middle East, why not organize a special synod for each of those countries that has not yet had one? Why should Lebanon and the Holy Land redo the same work?” The answer lies in the fact that the number and complexity of problems and challenges facing the Middle East are too large to be handled by the various single dioceses and churches separately. In addition, our globalized world makes a synod dealing comprehensively with all our common problems under the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff necessary, “cum Petro et sub Petro.”   The Synod sets forth two main goals: – Confirm and strengthen Christians in their identity through the Word of God and the Sacraments. – Give new life to the ecclesial communion between the sui iuris Churches so that they might provide an authentic witness of joyful and attractive Christian life. One peculiarity of the Middle East is the large number of sui iuris Eastern Churches that have taken root here: the Melkites, Syrians, Maronites, Copts, Armenians and Chaldeans. These Churches need to live their liturgical and linguistic particularity, on the one hand, and a greater communion among themselves, on the other. Currently, this communion leaves something to be desired. They also need pastoral and liturgical renewal. The Latin Church went through this change at the Second Vatican Council, which revolutionized its liturgy and ecclesiology and gave it a new openness to the world. The Eastern Churches are in need of a similar revolution so that they might be able to adapt and modernize and thus better meet the needs of their congregations today.   The geopolitical situation Turkey. This country has 72 million inhabitants (source: wikipedia), with a Muslim majority. Christians number 100,000, slightly more than 1 per thousand. Turkey is a secular country, separating state and religion (Islam). It is seeking to give a good impression to gain entry into the European Community. To Turkey’s credit, you could cite the secularization introduced by Ataturk in 1924; on the negative side, we must cite the Armenian genocide, for which Turkey refuses to take responsibility and the partition of the island of Cyprus between Turks and Greeks, which is also its responsibility.   Iran. In this country, Shia Islam is dominant in all sectors of society. Seventy-two million are Muslim, while

Bishop William Shomali | Auxiliary Of The Patriarchate Of Jerusalem*

Tourism Must Respect Biodiversity

“Biodiversity,” notes a statement released by the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People on the occasion of World Tourism Day (20th of September), “refers to the great wealth of beings that live on Earth, as well as the delicate equilibrium of interdependence and interaction that exists between them and the physical environment that hosts and conditions them. This biodiversity is translated into different ecosystems, of which examples can be found in forests, wetlands, savannah, jungles, deserts, coral reefs, mountains, seas and polar zones.” The message warns: “There are three imminent and grave dangers to them that require an urgent solution: climate change, desertification and the loss of biodiversity. The latter has been developing in recent years at an unprecedented rate. Recent studies indicate that, on a worldwide level, 22% of mammals, 31% of amphibians, 13.6% of bird life and 27% of reefs are threatened or in danger of extinction.” “There are numerous areas of human activity that largely contribute to these changes, and one of them is, without a doubt, tourism, which is among those activities that have experienced great and rapid growth,” the statement adds. And comments: “Tourists must be conscious that their presence in a place is not always positive. With this end, they must be informed of the real benefits that the conservation of biodiversity brings with it, and be educated in methods of sustainable tourism. Likewise, tourist should demand tourist business proposals that truly contribute to the development of the place. In no case, neither the land nor the historical-cultural heritage of the destination should be damaged in favor of the tourist, adapting itself to their tastes and desires. A major effort, in a special way the pastoral care of tourism, that must be realized is the education in contemplation to help tourists have the ability to discover the sign of God in the great wealth of biodiversity.” The international community has been seriously concerned with this problem. On several occasions, governments and leaders have made statements on the matter. The Church joins theirs, in accordance with her role, starting from the conviction that she has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. She must, above all, protect mankind from self-destruction. Without entering into the question of concrete technical solutions that would go beyond her competency, the Church concerns herself with drawing attention to the relationship between the Creator, the human being and creation. Church teaching reiterates insistently the responsibility of the human being in the preservation of an integral and healthy environment for all, from the conviction that the “care for the environment represents a challenge for all of humanity. It is a matter of a common and universal duty, that of respecting a common good.” Conversely, the tourist sector must “conceive, develop and conduct their businesses minimizing negative effects on, and positively

www.asianews.it

Bukas Palad Award For Fr. Sebastiano D’ambra

The Bukas Palad Award was originally named after Fr. Manuel Peypoch, a Jesuit who taught at the Ateneo de Manila and distinguished himself in serving the Jesuit Order, the Church and society in the areas of education and culture, in social and human development concerns. The Award was first given, in 1963, to Msgr. José Jovellanos. It was renamed BUKAS PALAD AWARD to “capture the Ignatian spirit of “generosity” and to give recognition to the unconditional, dedicated service of the Religious in Christ’s Kingdom. Motivated by Gospel values, [the awardee’s] “notable and invaluable contribution is an unmistakable evidence beyond the ordinary of an understanding of the prophetic role of the Church in today’s world and giving tangible proofs of this in the service given to his/her fellowmen, especially the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the sick, the suffering – in faith, justice and love.”  The award to Fr. Sebastiano is in recognition of his founding of the Silsilah Dialogue Movement “which helped plant the seeds of interreligious dialogue in the Philippines, particularly, in Mindanao, and nurturing and spreading them through leadership roles in the interreligious dialogue thrusts of Pontifical Institute for Foreign Mission (PIME) and the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP).” In his acceptance speech, Fr. Sebastiano expressed his deep gratitude to the Ateneo for the award and he said: “It is not just an honor but a responsibility to fulfill.” He added he shares the award with every Christian and Muslim in Mindanao who are committed to the mission of dialogue and peace. Further, he said: “Many are not ready for peace… peace must be sincere. In the deeper part of the conscience of each person, there is goodness. In dialogue, we have to reach that level. It is like a soil; you allow putting some elements just for the seed to grow. This is a movement, not an NGO in the usual sense; it is a movement and we want to stress this point. Thanks be to God that there are people entering in this spirit.” Fr. Sebastiano is a native of Sicily, Italy. He was assigned to the Philippines in 1977. He founded the Silsilah Dialogue Movement in 1984. The Movement marked its 25th anniversary in May, 2009. Over the 26 years of its existence, Silsilah has focused its efforts and resources on the promotion of dialogue, to bring people to a greater awareness of and faithfulness to what is taught in their respective religions. Because Christians and Muslims are the two dominant groups in this part of the country, Silsilah focuses on the promotion of dialogue between these two groups – in the hope that the understanding born of dialogue will bring out the fruit of peace in the region. 

WM

Christian Radio As An Interreligious Bridge

He visited Rome and told Vatican Radio workers: “We need the voice of Christians in the Holy Land. […] We need to give a voice to the Holy Land Christians.” And added: “There are many radio and television stations in the region, but we do not have any one of them.”  Father Raed Sahlieh hopes that the Christian radio station in the Holy Land, which will be launched in collaboration with Vatican Radio, will be up and running by Christmas Eve.  “It will be a Christian voice, but it certainly will be a different kind of voice: a voice for peace and hope, dialogue and reconciliation,” the priest affirmed. He continued: “We will be open to everyone and to all the churches in the Holy Land. We will give space and time for news and celebrations of various churches and we will be open also to other religions: Judaism, Islam.”  Fr. Sahlieh says: “We will try to be a bridge, because a Christian who is not a bridge, is not a real Christian.”  

www.zenit.org

Blasphemy Law Is An Evil Of Muslim Society

With regard to the case of the Emmanuel brothers, Aslam Khaki said: “We publicly condemn violence. No one may take the law in his own hands: this is the founding pillar of the rule of law. What is more, the two Christians were found to be innocent and had been acquitted by the Court. These events are wounds to legality and to respect for human rights, wounds which Pakistan must heal.” These wounds are caused by the controversial “blasphemy law, which creates disharmony in society and poses problems, particularly, for religious minorities. Our country does not need this law. The law is wrongly used for personal arguments and revenge. Many innocent citizens spend two or even three years in prison before being acquitted and released. While they are unjustly detained in prison, the families are often subjected to threats and violence.” The lawyer says he thinks the law should be abolished but this, he added, “depends on Parliament and I think there is little chance of it happening. Members of Parliament” – he adds – “are pressured by radical Islamic groups that threaten street protests and revolts. They fear the loss of consensus also because the law has been in force for twenty years and the people think it serves to defend the name of the Prophet.” According to Aslam Khaki, an intermediate step might be useful: “In the meantime, procedure could be modified: as jurists, we ask that a report for blasphemy may only be registered with the consent of an ad hoc commission which examines the case preventively, evaluates the evidence and decides whether or not to proceed with formal charging and arrest of the accused persons. This would be a means of guarantee and it would prevent the arrest of persons on false or invented charges.” The law in question “was born of an extremist mentality and approach.” Today, radical Islamic leaders “continue to instigate the crowds, especially the youth: the murderers of the two Christians were, without a doubt, persons manipulated by Islamic preachers who do great harm to society and to the nation,” the lawyer concluded.  

www.fides.org

Who Will Help Children Victims Of Warfare?

The rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have terrorized the people of northern Uganda since the early 1990s reaching as far as Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. At least 15,000 people are displaced and more than 5,000 Congolese refugees live in camps in the Central African Republic, while in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, abduction of children continues. In the past six months in the eastern province, at least 102 civilians were killed every month by the rebels. In rebel attacks on villages in the area between December and March, at least 302 people, including 125 children, were captured and many civilians were mutilated, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA. The Lord’s Resistance Army is notorious for its brutality and for forcefully enlisting children as soldiers or sex slaves or porters. And this violence continues to feed a growing humanitarian crisis. 

www.fides.org

Catholic Community Grows In Hope

The feast of Pentecost, 23 May 2010, “was a special feast for the mission,” says Fr. Daniele Giolitti. Six local women were received into the Church with the administration of the Sacraments. “Since we arrived in Mongolia in 2003, these are practically the first visible fruits of our presence as evangelizers in this part of the world.” “We wish to offer thanks to the Lord” – the missionary continues – “for these six new sisters in Christ who have made such a radical decision, if we think of the context in which they are prepared to live the Christian message which is so new for the people here.” The baptized are: Battogoo (Lucia), the youngest (23); Perlimaa (Rita) and Diimaa (Elisabetta), two sisters belonging to a large family; Narantuya (Caterina) and Otgonbayr (Maddalena), married with children; and Deejit (Anna). Explains Fr. Giolitti: “We accompanied them along a two-year path as they discovered the faith and then prepared them to receive the Sacraments. In these two years, they shared with us some aspects of daily family life, poverty and hardship.” On 19 September 2006, a small group of missionary priests and missionary Sisters of the Consolata Order took up residence in Arvaiheer after a long and arduous process which began officially in the summer of 2005, to obtain the necessary recognition in a region where the Catholic Church had never been present. At last, at the beginning of 2007, the local government granted the missionaries a permit for religious activity in the region of Uvurkhangai. This was the start of the new mission which has just borne its first fruits.  The Catholic community in Mongolia has a bishop and three parishes with almost 200 Mongolian born Catholics; a good number of catechumens preparing to be received into the Church; many groups for apostolate; well-frequented pastoral structures, including a number of kindergartens, a polytechnic school, homes for street children, for the disabled, for unmarried mothers. Missionary activity is entrusted to some 50 missionaries and Religious.  

www.fides.org

Religious Freedom, The Path To Peace

Anything which is opposed to the dignity of the human person is opposed to the search for the truth, and can never be regarded as religious freedom, the message says. And continues: “Today, there are many areas of the world in which forms of restrictions and limitations to religious freedom persist, both where communities of believers are a minority, and where communities of believers are not a minority, and where more sophisticated forms of discrimination and marginalization exist, on the cultural level and in the spheres of public, civil and political participation.” In his address to the Assembly of the United Nations on 18 April 2008, Benedict XVI stated: “It is inconceivable that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves – their faith – in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature.”  

www.fides.org

Climate Change And Extreme Weather

Further east, 127 people died and almost 2,000 were reported missing on August 8 after mudslides in north-western China. At least one village in Gansu province was buried entirely in mud forcing 45,000 people to evacuate. One half of Zhouqu County was submerged by flood waters which forced 50,000 to flee their homes. The flood waters swept away cars, trucks and even houses. According to figures issued by the Chinese government, the number of people who have died in flooding in the first seven months of 2010 stood at more than 2,000. The number of people forced out of their homes by the recent flooding has reached 12 million.  Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic have also been hit by extreme weather events. On August 7, 2010, torrential rain caused rivers to burst their banks in south western Poland, submerging towns and causing at least 3 fatalities.  Further east in Russia, the problem is not excessive rain or floods, but the opposite, a prolonged heatwave with temperatures at record levels of 38 degrees Celsius. These have led to numerous forest and peat fires right across the country. A government minister, Sergei Shoigi, told the media that there were more than 550 fires, covering 17,000 hectares, burning across Russia. As a consequence, Moscow and its many landmarks, such as the Kremlin, have been shrouded in a toxic smog for weeks. Further south, there are fears that the fires could release radioactive nuclides from the land contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear accident. We can include in the list the severe drought which is causing hunger and malnutrition in the eastern Sahel in West Africa. It is estimated that 10 million people are affected in four different countries. In Niger, the worst affected area, it is estimated that 7.1 million people are hungry and facing a bleak future as livestock have been lost and food prices are soaring. This catastrophe has received very little coverage in western media.  In Latin America, in April 2010, heavy rains in the state of Rio de Janeiro caused floods and mudslides leading to the death of at least 212 people. In June, Brazil experienced severe floods once again, this time in the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco in the north eastern part of Brazil. At least 1,000 people died or were reported missing.  Another spectacular event happened on August 5, 2010, when a section of the Petermann Glacier on the north western coast of Greenland, measuring 97 square miles, broke off. While there is nothing new in icebergs ‘calving’ this is the largest break off since 1962. Robert Bindschadler, a senior research scientist at MASA Goddard Space Flight Center, points out that changes in calving will happen as climate changes because the environment is changing.”  Peter Scott, who is head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office, has been sifting through the data on the extreme weather events during the past few months in Asia and Russia. He writes that, “evidence, including in India and

Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC

Nobel Upsets Chinese Diplomacy

A 54-year-old scholar and writer, Liu is a thorny reminder for the Chinese communist party of its tarnished and unredeemed past. In 1989, he was one of the protesters who staged a hunger strike in the ceremonial heart of Beijing, Tiananmen, attempting to avert a violent end to the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations. Liu is also a symbol of China’s still flickering democratic movement which, after years of suppression, continues to hold out hope that those universal values will prevail over the country’s authoritarian system. In 2008, just months after Beijing staged a dazzling Olympic Games, he was the leading figure among hundreds of liberal intellectuals who published an online manifesto calling for sweeping political reforms.  Released on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘Charter 08’ delivered an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s efforts to assert its own values and for it to argue that Chinese people prefer affluence to freedom. China faced a choice, the manifesto argued, of maintaining its authoritarian system or “recognizing universal values, joining the mainstream of civilization and setting up a democracy.” Liu was detained immediately, and after being held in custody for a year, jailed for 11 years for “inciting subversion of state power.” Some 12,000 people have put their signatures to the petition since.  Beijing reacted with fury to the prize announcement. A statement on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s website called the award a “desecration” of the Peace Prize and a choice that goes against the aims of the award. It called Liu a “criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.” In the weeks before the award was known, Chinese diplomats had been issuing warnings about diplomatic trouble if the Prize went to Liu. In the day of the announcement, a statement warned the choice of Liu as winner will hurt China’s relations with Norway, the country where the Nobel committee is based.  Inside the country, there has been a total news blackout on the fact that the prestigious award has been given, for the first time, to a Chinese citizen. Liu’s choice is particularly hurtful to Beijing because China has a “Nobel Prize” syndrome, always sulking that its illustrious civilization and rising stature on the global scene have not been properly recognized. “Every year around this time there is so much speculation whether China will be finally recognized with a Nobel Prize,” said Zhao Hongli, a Beijing intellectual who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and remembers Liu from those days. “The news will quickly filter through and I hope there will be a revival of the Tiananmen legacy.”  Beijing’s fury at Liu’s choice mirrors the time in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. The Dalai Lama won the Prize for his peaceful pursuit of genuine autonomy for Tibet, sparking accusations by China that the West supports what Beijing calls his “separatist cause.” He

www.ipsnews.net / Antoaneta Becker
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