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“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.
