Lebanese priest: ‘We need your prayers’ after Beirut explosions

Thiruvananthapuram, India, Aug 29, 2018 / 11:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As flood waters in India’s southwestern state of Kerala recede, Catholic aid agencies are helping provide aid materials to those affected by the disaster.

“The SVP in India has been extremely busy working with local fisherman to help rescue people trapped in flooded homes. SVP volunteers are collecting and coordinating the distribution of aid materials, using resources available from British donations together with their own money to buy vital goods,” Johnson Varghese, president of the St. Vincent de Paul Society in India, said Aug. 28.

“We desperately need donations as the rescue effort goes on. As people move back to their damaged homes, we’ll be using funds to help rebuild their houses, purchase household utensils, school materials such as uniforms, books, and even livestock to replace lost farm animals.”

Severe rains led to flash floods and landslides in Kerala, with some 400 people killed and more than 1 million displaced from their homes.

Those now returning to their flooded homes are encountering snakes and insects, contaminated water, and ruined crops.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society is raising and distributing funds for the displaced, and purchasing for them food, clothing, and livestock.

Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Bombay wrote to the people of his diocese Aug. 18 to “make a fervent appeal to all our churches, convents and other institutions to join in the relief efforts.”

“First of all, by prayer for the victims, their families and the rescue teams,” he suggested. “We could add this intention in the Prayer of the Faithful at Mass. We also urgently need financial assistance to continue and extend our relief efforts being coordinated by Caritas India.”

The cardinal said that his local Church, located in Maharashtra state, “cannot stay silent, while our brothers and sisters are going through harrowing times in Kerala.”

“Caritas India, the Catholic Church’s social arm, has already placed teams in different parts of Kerala to assist and coordinate relief operations,” said Cardinal Gracias.

Catholic Relief Services has provided water purifying tablets for clean drinking water, buckets for safe water storage, hygiene items, such as soap and sanitary napkins, and shelter kits that include tarps and blankets, to more than 2,000 families in Kerala’s Wayanad district.

Earlier in August, India’s bishops issued a statement expressing their support for the relief efforts and offering their prayers for all those affected by the floods.

“We pray for all those affected and also for all who are actively or through contributions helping the people in dire distress,” they said.

While they noted several Catholic relief efforts already underway, they also expressed their “ardent desire to work with the Government and all like-minded agencies to provide relief and help in all possible ways to the suffering people.”

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Chittagong, Bangladesh, Dec 6, 2018 / 10:50 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As new evidence emerges of atrocities committed in Burma’s Rakhine state, the president of Caritas International visited Monday a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh.

In 2017 the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group,  faced a sharp increase in state-sponsored violence in Burma, also known as Myanmar. The violence reached levels that led the United Nations to declare the crisis “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled across the border to Bangladesh, and are living in refugee camps, many of which are located in a swampy sort of “buffer zone” along the border between the two countries.

Researchers with the Public International Law and Policy Group, contracted by the U.S. State Department to investigate Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya, found “reasonable grounds to believe that genocide was committed against the Rohingya,” in a report published Dec. 3.

The researchers interviewed more than 1,000 refugees, who shared their experiences of “mass shootings, aerial bombardments, gang rapes and severe beatings, torture and burning” by Burma’s armed forces.

Seventy percent of the Rohingya interviewed had witnessed their homes or villages being destroyed and 80 percent witnessed the killing of a family member, friend, or personal acquaintance.
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Cardinal Luis Tagle of Manila visited Kutupalong refugee camp, more than 100 miles south of Chittagong, Dec. 3, describing it as “a cry to the whole world for a better politics based on compassion and solidarity.”

“When will we learn our lessons and be able to stop a crisis of this magnitude happening again? How as an international community and a human family can we get back to the basics of dignity, care and compassion?” continued Tagle.

The Filipino cardinal is the president of Caritas International, a group that has served the Rohingya refugee population since the crisis began.

Caritas has helped nearly 500,000 refugees by providing shelter, water, sanitation, hygiene, and living supplies.

“The situation of refugees from Myanmar was heartbreaking for me when I came first, but I’m seeing things improve,” Tagle said. “We wish for a permanent solution for these people who are stateless and helpless. It is our responsibility to be with them. We want them to have a happy life.”

Tagle found particular hope in seeing the efforts of the Caritas Bangladesh volunteers and staff to help the refugees during the Advent season.

“Here I am this first week of Advent with a people waiting for a future,” Tagle said. “For us Advent is waiting not for something but for someone. Jesus, who was born poor, who became a refugee but who never stops loving. I hope this message coming from this camp will encourage all of us never to get tired of loving.”

Bangladesh and Burma have agreed to a repatriation program which began last month, but few if any Rohingya have chosen to return to their homeland.

The Burmese government refused to use the term Rohingya, and considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They have been denied citizenship and numerous other rights since a controversial law was enacted in 1982.

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Seoul, South Korea, May 15, 2017 / 08:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- South Korean Catholics are opposing both the country’s reliance on nuclear power and the U.S. missile defense system recently established to pressure the North out of future weapon tests.

A major leader of the anti-nuclear movement, Father Moon Paul Kyu-Hyn, said “getting rid of nuclear power is the only way to survive, to save ourselves, and save the world,” according to Public Radio International.

A missile defense system has caused tensions between the U.S. and China as well as between China and South Korea. The country’s new president, Moon Jae-in, has emphasized his goal to solve the issues in the Korean Peninsula.

Father Moon expressed his disappointed in the new Terminal High Altitude Area Defense or THAAD, which became operational on May 2 in the Korean Peninsula. An agreement to install the system was established between the United States and South Korea’s former president, recently incarcerated for political corruption.

“THAAD is a weapon of war. You can’t be for peace if you’re preparing for war,” said Father Moon, an activist who spent three years in jail for illegally crossing over into North Korea in 1989.

He is now leading the charge on the anti-nuclear demonstrations participated by the clergy and lay people, who are opposed the expansion of nuclear power in all of Korea and the rest of the world. The group recently gathered in downtown Seoul to collect a million signatures for support against nuclear energy.

Nearly a third of the country’s electrical consumption relies on nuclear power from over 20 nuclear reactors. Moon Jae-in, who was confirmed president this week, promised to halt expansion of nuclear power and focus on clean energy during a campaign speech in April.

The push to remove nuclear power has increased in South Korea since three plants in Fukushima had a meltdown in 2011 caused by a Tsunami along the shores of Japan. The meltdown forced over 100,000 people to be evacuated from their homes, and the government is still cautious to allow everyone to return due to fears of radiation poison.

In an interview with Public Radio International, Father Cho Hyun-chul, a theology professor at Sogang University in Seoul, said if there is a similar accident revolving South Korea’s power plants then there would be “no room for us to live here. There is no more safe land.”

He continued to say that the destruction nuclear power can cause is “directly against God’s intention,” and the movement is stressing the need to care for the environment – a need heavily emphasized by Pope Francis especially in his encyclical Laudato Si.

The Pope recognized the “tremendous power” nuclear energy has gifted to humanity, but he also spoke against its dangers to the environment and the risk of being used improperly. He said a global consensus to focus on clean and renewable energy is essential for sustaining the earth.

“Such a consensus could lead, for example, to planning a sustainable and diversified agriculture, developing renewable and less polluting forms of energy,” Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si.

According to Reuters, President Moon promised to ease away from nuclear energy in a campaign speech in April. The head for the president’s team on energy policy said South Korea “should move away from coal and nuclear power, and shift to clean or renewable energy-based platforms,” and that he would stop the plans to construct two new reactors in the south of the country.

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