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The Church’s charitable organizations are models to imitate, in the sense that their low operating costs mean nearly all donated monies go directly to the needy, said Cardinal Paul Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, the agency that coordinates and promotes the world’s Catholic institutions of assistance and volunteering.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, leader of the powerful Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and twice prime minister, has pushed to the brink a country already known for regionalism and ethnic suspicion. Bhutto was widely acknowledged as the only leader who enjoyed popularity in the four ethnically distinct provinces of the country, Punjab, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) besides her own Sindh.
In his New Year’s Day address, President Hu Jintao said that China was facing “unprecedented opportunities as well as challenges” in 2008. Rhetoric aside, analysts agree that 2008 will be a landmark year for the mainland.
Catholic nuns in India are planning a theology research institute to empower women religious and redress the gender disparity in religious studies. The four-day annual plenary of the women’s section of the Conference of Religious proposed the initiative before it ended on January 1. About 350 major superiors representing more than 90,000 women religious gathered in Mangalore, 2,290 kilometers southwest of New Delhi, for the assembly.
Four Franciscans, three priests and a brother arrived in Sudan in July 2007. The archbishop of Khartoum, Cardinal Gabriel Zubeir, introduced them officially to the diocesan community, during the Eucharistic celebration in honor of St. Daniel Comboni, on October 10. The four newly-arrived Franciscans (2 Sudanese from the South, 1 Croatian and 1 Filipino) have offered themselves for the job to answer the call of their Superior-General. The superior of the group is Filipino Father Melito Penili. After a few years of academic and administrative work in the Philippines, he spent four years in Libya among the OFWs. Then he frequented a two-year Arabic course at Dar Comboni in Cairo, a language school for missionaries.
Benedict XVI asked political leaders in Kenya to engage in dialogue and urged the strife-torn East African nation to build peace based on justice and brotherhood. Kenya erupted in violence after the disputed December 27 presidential election. More than 600 people have been killed and thousands more displaced in the violence that has brought about fighting based on ethnic lines.
In Asia, a continent where great cultural and religious traditions had their origin, dialogue becomes particularly significant for Christians for they can see the “seeds of truth” the Holy Spirit placed in other faiths and can make them blossom towards Christianity. The Asian theological perspective of the Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on some aspects of evangelization was examined by Cardinal Ivan Dias, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, who took part in the presentation of the document.
The Catholic bishops of the Philippines have decried the widespread “immoral and grossly exploitative” practice of soliciting donations of vital human organs which offends the dignity of the person for economic profit. The Bishops’ Conference intervened to call attention to the “spreading organ trafficking, particularly the commercialization of kidneys, which is silently but steadily thriving in rural and urban poor communities.” The phenomenon is in the hands of organized crime which does not hesitate to abduct and kill street children, homeless people, ordinary people for the trafficking of vital organs.
Northern Philippine Church workers are planting trees and campaigning against quarrying to help restore the famed rice terraces that face removal from the United Nations’ World Heritage List. “We are aware of the various threats to the rice terraces and we are doing our part to respond to these through our Integrity of Creation program,” Rowena Ngitiw, Bontoc-Lagawe vicariate’s Social Action and Development Center coordinator, explained.
In our world today, 27 million people live in an enslaved condition. This was affirmed by Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, in a seminar on slavery and the new forms of slavery promoted by the Catholic bishops of Africa and Europe in Cape Coast, Ghana.
