Cardinal Joseph Coutts at the Rome office of Aid to the Church in Need April 2, 2019. Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA.
CNA Staff, Feb 11, 2021 / 07:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis on Thursday named a 54-year-old successor to Cardinal Joseph Coutts as Archbishop of Karachi, Pakistan.
The Holy See press office announced on Feb. 11 that the pope had chosen Bishop Benny Mario Travas to lead Latin Rite Catholics in Pakistan’s largest city.
Karachi, the capital of Sindh province in southern Pakistan, has an estimated population of more than 16 million people, making it the world’s 12th-largest city.
The pope also accepted the resignation of the 75-year-old Cardinal Coutts from the pastoral governance of Karachi archdiocese after nine years in charge.
Travas was born in Karachi on Nov. 21, 1966, and ordained a priest on Dec. 7, 1990.
He gained a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome, an institution belonging to the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
He served as the rector of the St. Pius X Minor Seminary in Karachi, vicar general of Karachi archdiocese, and vice president of the Catholic Board of Education. He was also a professor of canon law at the National Catholic Institute of Theology in Karachi.
In 2014, he was appointed apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Multan, southern Punjab. He became the bishop of Multan a year later. He is the chairman of Caritas Pakistan.
According to the website catholic-hierarchy.org, there were 197,700 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Karachi in 2019. The Diocese of Karachi was initially established in 1948 under the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Bombay, India. It was elevated to an archdiocese in 1950.
Coutts, an outspoken defender of persecuted Christians, received the red hat from Pope Francis on June 28, 2018.
He served as president of the Pakistan Catholic Bishops’ Conference from 2011 to 2017, and was chairman of Caritas Pakistan from 1998 to 2017.
There are around 1.3 million Catholics in Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country with an estimated population of 233 million.
In January, the charity Open Doors named Pakistan, the world’s fifth-most populous nation, as the fifth-worst country in the world in which to be a Christian.
In a 2018 interview with CNA, Coutts reflected on the rise of extremism in his homeland.
“We’ve always had these kinds of people on the fringes, but they weren’t dominant,” he said. “Now they are becoming more assertive.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
A reconstruction of an ancient church recently discovered in Armenia. The newly discovered church measures about 100 feet across and is shaped like an octagon with “cruciform annexes oriented east-west and north-south,” according to Achim Lictenberger, who noted the discovery of a similar structure from a slightly later period found in Abchazia (Sebastopol). / Credit: AGAP
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 24, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).
A team of German and Armenian researchers made a groundbreaking discovery last week of an ancient church in Armenia dating back to the fourth century, making it the oldest documented church in Armenia, which is considered the first Christian nation in the world.
In an email correspondence with CNA, co-directors of the project Achim Lichtenberger and Torben Schreiber of the University of Münster and Hayk Gyulamiryan of the Armenian Academy of Sciences explained the significance of the discovery made by the team at the site of the ancient city of Artaxata. The project’s fourth co-director, Mkrtich H. Zardaryan, could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.
Historic roots of Christianity in Armenia
“Being the first country which adopted Christianity at the state level, and where the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew preached Christianity in the early first century, this discovery is a very important fact for Armenians,” Gyulamiryan told CNA, further stating that “the findings are among the most important in Armenia in recent decades.”
Lichtenberger also emphasized the site’s particular importance, as the church was discovered near the monastery of Khor Virap, where Gregory the Illuminator had been kept in prison before he converted the Armenian king Tiradates III to Christianity in the fourth century.
The monastery of Khor Virap and Ararat in Armenia. Credit: AGAP
As Gyulamiryan stated, although the roots of Christianity may be traced back to the time of the apostles in Armenia, it was not until 301 that Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of Armenia.
According to tradition, Armenia’s conversion is attributed to St. Gregory the Illuminator, a Christian evangelist and convert from Zoroastrianism who miraculously cured the nation’s pagan king of a peculiar “illness” after no other pagan priest was able to do so.
The widely-adopted story of how Armenia became Christian draws from a mythical history promulgated by the fifth-century author Agathangelos, the Armenian researcher explained.
As the legend goes, the pagan king of Armenia had become fascinated by the beauty of St. Hripsime, a nun who had fled with her abbess and community from persecution in Rome. The king offered to marry and make her queen, but Hripsime refused and was able to ward off the king’s advances through miraculous strength.
After the king ultimately had Hripsime and her community killed, historians claim he was “turned into a wild boar who tore at his own flesh” and could not be cured by any priests of pagan or Zoroastrian temples who attempted the feat.
Eventually, the king’s sister persuaded him to appeal to St. Gregory, whom the king had imprisoned for the past 15 years. Once St. Gregory was released, he cured the king of his “disease” and converted him and the entire royal family to the Christian faith.
Artaxata, where these events are believed to have taken place, is “a major place related to early Christianity in Armenia,” Lichtenberger told CNA.
St. Gregory is revered both in the Orthodox Armenian Apostolic Church and in the Catholic Church traditions. In 2005, Pope John Paul II erected a 19-foot statue of St. Gregory in the north courtyard of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
The excavation area of the archeological site where the remains of an ancient church were found in Armenia. Credit: AGAP
The discovery
The newly-discovered church measures about 100 feet across and is shaped like an octagon with “cruciform annexes oriented east-west and north-south,” according to Lichtenberger, who noted the discovery of a similar structure from a slightly later period found in Abchazia (Sebastopol).
Although the Araxata site was previously discovered, Lichtenberger told CNA that the church had been buried underground and gone undiscovered until the team carried out its magnetic prospections and excavations this past spring.
The researchers confirmed in September the age of the church to be from about 350 A.D. using radiocarbon dating techniques on a series of samples taken from a wooden platform belonging to the original construction of the building.
Ahead of the autumn excavations this year, Gyulamiryan told CNA he remembered thinking that the team “should confidently dig up the next chapter of the history of Armenia.”
The massive mortar wall of the recently discovered ancient church believed to be the oldest in Armenia. Credit: AGAP
According to Lichtenberger, the radiocarbon date from the wooden samples corresponded with pottery shards that were also discovered inside the church and with “the overall construction technique of the building using substantial amounts of mortar.”
“In the center of the church we encountered significant amounts of marble decoration that suggest that this part was prominently adorned,” he said. Interestingly, the German researcher noted that the state of the building upon discovery indicated that it had perhaps met a hostile end.
“The building was heavily destroyed (maybe intentionally),” he wrote, “the marble construction smashed, parts of the floor tiles removed, the roof set on fire, and all was buried in a huge collapse of roof tiles and burnt roof beams.”
However, according to Lichtenberger, there are no primary literary sources that correspond to the church, as “literary sources only relate to a seventh-century A.D. church in Artaxata.”
By contrast, while the Armenian literary tradition attests that the oldest church in the country is the Etchmiadzin Cathedral, Lichtenberger noted, “archeological evidence from this place does not date back to the mid-fourth century A.D.”
“This does not mean that Etchmiadzin is younger than the Artaxata church, it only means that the Artaxata church provides earlier archaeological evidence,” he added. “Therefore we assume that the Artaxata church is the oldest archaeologicallyattested church in Armenia.”
The Etchmiadzin Cathedral, which Armenian literary tradition attests is the oldest church in the country. But Achim Lichtenberger says this “does not mean that Etchmiadzin is younger than the Artaxata church, it only means that the Artaxata church provides earlier archaeological evidence. Therefore we assume that the Artaxata church is the oldest archaeologically attested church in Armenia.” Credit: Madalaine Elhabbal
Future of the project
Schreiber shared with CNA in another email chain that analysis of data collected from the site will play a significant role in future archeological measures.
“The interaction of the excavation results, the geophysical survey, and the scientific investigations (natural sciences) will keep us busy in the coming year,” Schreiber said. “However, we are certain that these measures will provide us with a very comprehensive picture of this extraordinary and important find.”
Excavations in the ancient ruins of a church recently discovered in Armenia, the oldest Christian nation in the world. Credit: AGAP
The research team from the University of Münster and the Armenian Academy of Sciences have been at the Artaxata site since 2018 and have also made other noteworthy discoveries, including an unfinished Roman aqueduct, a Hellenistic sanctuary, and the remains of an Urartian settlement, according to Lichhtenberger.
The team of researchers also includes 10 students from the German university along with various internal and external specialists who consulted with the team on different groups of materials at the site, including animal and human bones, plants, or “archaeobotanical” matter, marble, plaster, pottery, and roof tiles — “of which we found a lot,” Lichtenberger said.
“We will continue the work of the Armenian-German Artaxata Project in the future,” he told CNA.
Carlos Ximenes Felipe Belo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts related to East Timor, speaks during an Indonesian Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF) public hearing in Jakarta, March 26 March. / Photo credit: AHMAD ZAMRONI/AFP via Ge… […]
Jalandhar, India, Sep 18, 2018 / 07:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Catholic bishop in India accused of raping a nun repeatedly over the course of two years has written to the Vatican asking permission to be relieved of his duties as bishop while the case is investigated.
“Bishop Franco Mulakkal wrote a letter to Holy Father Pope Francis expressing his desire to step aside temporarily and requested to be relieved from the administration of the Diocese,” the Diocese of Jullundur, which Mulakkal leads, said in a statement released over the weekend and reported by Reuters.
The request came days before Sept. 19, when Mulakkal is set to be questioned by police in the southern state of Kerala, and after protests calling for his arrest have escalated.
Seven nuns gathered in a public square in Kochi earlier this month to protest how both police and the Church have responded to one nun’s accusation that Bishop Mulakkal raped her in 2014 and sexually abused her multiple times over two years.
A lay group in the Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly, called the Movement for Transparency, has filed a police complaint charging that Cardinal George Alencherry, who heads the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, received the nun’s complaint six months ago but failed to report it to the police.
“The Church has not given us justice. Neither have the police or government. So, we will fight. We feel that it was the Church which forced us onto the streets,” Sister Anupama of the Missionaries of Jesus, one of the Kochi protesters, told the Times of India Sept. 8.
A Kerala nun has said that Mulakkal raped her during his May 2014 visit to her convent in Kuravilangad, in Kerala state. In a 72-page complaint to police, filed June 29, she alleged that the bishop sexually abused her more than a dozen times over two years.
Mulakkal has denied the accusations, claiming that they were made in retaliation against him because he has acted against the nun’s sexual misconduct, according to UCA News. He said the nun was alleged to be having an affair with her cousin’s husband.
Three more women have accused the bishop in recent days of sexual misconduct against them, but the congregation’s superior general maintains that the bishop is innocent.
According to Reuters, the nun who first filed a complaint against Mulakkal has also filed a complaint with the Vatican against the bishop last week.
UCA News also reported that Mulakkal filed an anticipatory bail plea with the Kerala High Court Sept. 18, which was accepted.
The Vatican has not yet commented on the case, nor has it announced whether Mulakkal’s request has been accepted.
Before leaving for his meeting with police in Kerala, Mulakkal handed over the administrative duties of his local Church to Monsignor Mathew Kokkandam, The News Minute reported.
Cardinal Joseph Coutts is respected by people of different faiths for his efforts to promote inter-religious dialogue. All the best to Bishop Benny Mario Travas in his services to his flock.
Cardinal Joseph Coutts is respected by people of different faiths for his efforts to promote inter-religious dialogue. All the best to Bishop Benny Mario Travas in his services to his flock.