A missionary priest of the Order of St. Elijah celebrates a Mass attended by Christians liberated from slavery in a small chapel in Pakistan. / Credit: Courtesy of Order of St. Elijah
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oct 24, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).
There are young people who are called to serve in dangerous places, not just in the military but also as missionaries. The latter call has been heeded by a select few, willing to go where the faith has been oppressed or even absent for centuries.
Project Omnes Gentes is a Catholic missionary initiative of the Order of St. Elijah, based in Argentina, to share the Gospel for the first time to nations who do not know Christ. It organizes short-term missions to the most remote places, including Malawi, Pakistan, Tibet, and Yemen.
CNA interviewed missionaries who recently returned from Pakistan, where they freed nearly 200 Christians from slavery. Rico and Diego are not further identified because of the peril it represents for them and persecuted Christians.
Diego, a young lay Spaniard who recently reconverted to the faith, bravely threw himself into one of the most perilous missions yet undertaken by the order. “Since my conversion about five months ago, I have felt a great need to spread the Gospel,” he told CNA.
Recalling his conversion, he said once leaving Mass as an unbeliever, he suddenly felt an “oppressive presence, like an immense and heavy blanket.” Diego cried out to God for help.
“After having let God be part of my life again, multiplying its value exponentially, I could not remain silent, I had to go on a mission. With the Order of St. Elijah, I could. I couldn’t be more grateful to God for putting them in my path and being able to help them preach the Gospel,” he said.
Diego accompanied Rico, a priest of the order, to the Punjab region of Pakistan, a country dominated by Islam. According to International Christian Concern, at least 1,000 girls and women in that country are annually abducted, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. A report by InfoVaticana claimed some 700 of these are Christians. Many are forced into hard labor or domestic slavery.
Father Rico told CNA: “Thanks to God and the holy Virgin, the mission accomplished its goals. We rescued five illiterate female sex slaves, who were raped for 10 years by four different men. When the rapists went looking for them, we were able to take them into hiding. We also rescued 75 debt slaves: among whom, there were people who were tortured and many little girls. We ‘bought’ them with the money donated to us by a bishop.”
“After the rescues, we assist them with what they need to survive. We want to start a small safe neighborhood for freed slaves — why not dream if ‘nothing will be impossible with God,’” he said, quoting Luke 1:37. The new Christian enclave, he said, will be called “Pax,” Latin for “peace.”
It was no coincidence, Father Rico said, that he began his work on the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Aug. 15, and finished on the feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary, Sept. 12. He will return within a few months to liberate more.
“Of the 80 freed slaves, six Christian families had fallen into unwilling apostasy because they had renounced Christ and become Muslims,” he said. “The men were tortured and women raped in the process. When we went to rescue them, they said they were sorry. Those families were Protestant Christians.” He was under nearly constant surveillance by Muslim informants, whose testimony could have meant death.
A local volunteer (left in photo) speaks to an extended family of Pakistani Christians liberated from slavery. Credit: Courtesy of Order of St. Elijah
“We saw malice so extreme that it could not be merely human malice. I think it was a preternatural, demonic malice. How else can it be explained that they drug a man to rape his wife and kill the baby generated in the rape through an abortion?” Father Rico said.
He added that he hopes to consult with Catholic psychologists and social workers to help the healing of the liberated slaves. “Above all, we will place the victims before the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary,” he said.
The priest said the unbaptized and Protestant Christians requested admittance to full communion with the Catholic Church. He baptized according to the traditional Rituale Romanum, which includes several exorcisms.
“We gave them images of the Holy Family, Bibles, and rosaries. We celebrated holy Mass for them and put them in contact with a priest who will catechize them. They entered the Catholic Church full of joy,” he recounted.
“Seeing the Holy Spirit work such miracles, and seeing how Christians prefer death rather than renounce the faith, united me with the mystical body of Christ on levels that I could not have imagined,” Diego said. “It is truly overwhelming to talk to these persecuted Catholics about their conversions, their faith, their experiences. I am sure that many of them, living through that hell, will earn heaven.”
According to a 2023 report by WalkFree, approximately 10 out of every 1,000 Pakistanis are engaged in forced labor. In other words, 2.3 million Pakistanis are subjected to forced labor or forced marriage. The nonprofit watchdog says Pakistan ranks 18th in the world and fourth in Asia for these practices. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that forced labor is notable in brickmaking, carpet weaving, coal mining, and agriculture.
Pakistan’s Christians are frequently targeted by Muslims and authorities for violating the country’s strict Muslim blasphemy laws that forbid denouncing Islam and its founder, Muhammad. In September, Aid to the Church in Need reported that a Pakistani woman, a mother of four, was sentenced to death for the alleged crime.
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Jimmy Lai and other demonstrators were convicted in 2021 of taking part in what the Hong Kong government argued was an “unauthorized assembly” at Victoria Park in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay neighborhood. / Credit: 美国之音莉雅, Public domain, via Wikime… […]
A defining theme of Pope Francis’ papacy has been his urging of humanity to better care for the natural environment, which he has done most prominently in his landmark 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ and numerous subsequent writings and speeches.
The pope’s emphasis on this topic — especially his foray into climate science via his recent encyclical Laudate Deum — has variously drawn both praise and consternation from Catholics in the United States, about half of whom do not share Pope Francis’ views on climate change, according to surveys.
In Laudate Deum, which was released in October as a continuation to Laudato Si’, Francis wrote that the effects of climate change “are here and increasingly evident,” warning of “immensely grave consequences for everyone” if drastic efforts are not made to reduce emissions. In the face of this, the Holy Father criticized those who “have chosen to deride [the] facts” about climate science, stating bluntly that it is “no longer possible to doubt the human — ‘anthropic’ — origin of climate change.”
The pope in the encyclical laid out his belief that there must be a “necessary transition towards clean energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels.” This follows a call from Pope Francis in 2021 to the global community calling for the world to “achieve net zero carbon emissions as soon as possible.”
He further lamented what he called “certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions [on climate change] that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church.”
In light of the new encyclical — which extensively cites the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — Pope Francis was invited to speak at this week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP28. Though the 86-year-old pope was forced to cancel his trip due to health issues, the Vatican has indicated that he aims to participate in COP28 this weekend in some fashion. It announced today that Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin will represent the pope at the conference.
While various Catholic groups have welcomed the pope’s latest encyclical, some Catholics have reacted with persistent doubts, questioning whether the pope’s policy prescriptions would actually produce the desired effects.
How do Americans feel about climate change?
According to a major survey conducted by Yale University, 72% of Americans believed in 2021 — the latest available data year — that “global warming is happening,” and 57% believe that global warming is caused by human activity.
More recent polling from the Pew Research Center, conducted in June, similarly suggests that two-thirds of U.S. adults overall say the country should prioritize developing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, over the expansion of the production of oil, coal, and natural gas. That same survey found that just 3 in 10 adults (31%) say the U.S. should completely phase out oil, coal, and natural gas. The Yale study found that 77% of U.S. adults support at least the funding of research into renewable energy sources.
Broken down by party affiliation, Pew found that a large majority of Democratic and Democratic-leaning independents — 90% — favor alternative energy sources, while just under half, 42%, of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults think the same. Within the Republican cohort, however, 67% of Republicans under age 30 prioritize the development of alternative energy sources, compared with the 75% of Republicans ages 65 and older who prioritize the expansion of oil, coal, and natural gas.
In terms of the expansion of alternative energy sources, two-thirds of Americans think the federal government should encourage domestic production of wind and solar power, Pew reported. Just 7% say the government should discourage this, while 26% think it should neither encourage nor discourage it.
How do America’s Catholics feel about climate change?
Surveys suggest that Catholics in the United States are slightly more likely than the U.S. population as a whole to be skeptical of climate change, despite the pope’s emphatic words in 2015 and since.
A separate Pew study suggests that 44% of U.S. Catholics say the Earth is warming mostly due to human activity, a view in line with Pope Francis’ stance. About 3 in 10 (29%) said the Earth is warming mostly due to natural patterns, while 13% said they believe there is no solid evidence the planet is getting warmer.
According to the same study, 71% of Hispanic Catholics see climate change as an extremely or very serious problem, compared with 49% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics. (There were not enough Black or Asian Catholics in the 2022 survey to analyze separately, Pew said.)
One 2015 study from Yale did suggest that soon after Laudato Si’ was released, U.S. Catholics were overall more likely to believe in climate change than before. That same study found no change, however, in the number of Americans overall who believe human activity is causing global warming.
Pope Francis’ climate priorities
Beyond his groundbreaking writings, Pope Francis has taken many actions during his pontificate to make his own — admittedly small — country, Vatican City, more sustainable, including the recent announcement of a large order of electric vehicles, construction of its own network of charging stations, a reforestation program, and the continued importation of energy coming exclusively from renewable sources.
Francis has often lamented what he sees as a tepid response from developed countries in implementing measures to curb climate change. In Laudate Deum, he urged that new multinational agreements on climate change — speaking in this case specifically about the COP28 conference — be “drastic, intense, and count on the commitment of all,” stating that “a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.”
The pope lamented what he sees as the fact that when new projects related to green energy are proposed, the potential for economic growth, employment, and human promotion are thought of first rather than moral considerations such as the effects on the world’s poorest.
“It is often heard also that efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels and developing cleaner energy sources will lead to a reduction in the number of jobs,” the pope noted.
“What is happening is that millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts, and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift. Conversely, the transition to renewable forms of energy, properly managed, as well as efforts to adapt to the damage caused by climate change, are capable of generating countless jobs in different sectors.”
‘Leave God’s creation better than we found it’
Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation think tank, told CNA that he has noticed a theme of frustration and confusion among many Catholics regarding the Holy Father’s emphasis on climate change.
A self-described outdoorsman and former president of Wyoming Catholic College, Roberts spoke highly to CNA of certain aspects of Laudato Si’, particularly the pope’s insights into what he called “human ecology,” which refers to the acceptance of each person’s human body as a vital part of “accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home.”
Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. Courtesy of Heritage Foundation.
“I like to think [Pope Francis] personally wrote that, because I could see him saying that,” Roberts said of the passage, which appears in paragraph 155 of the encyclical. Roberts said he even makes a point to meditate on that “beautiful and moving” passage during a retreat that he does annually.
That portion of Laudato Si’ notwithstanding, Roberts said he strongly believes that it detracts from other important issues, such as direct ministry to the poor, when Pope Francis elevates care for God’s natural creation as “seemingly more important than other issues to us as Catholics.” He also said he disagrees with Pope Francis’ policy prescriptions, such as a complete phasing out of fossil fuels, contained in Laudate Deum.
“We of course want to pray for him. We’re open to the teaching that he is providing. But we also have to remember as Catholics that sometimes popes are wrong. And on this issue, it is a prudential matter. It is not a matter of morality, particularly when he’s getting into the scientific policy recommendations,” Roberts said.
Roberts said the Heritage Foundation’s research and advocacy has focused not on high-level, multinational agreements and conferences to tackle the issues posed by climate change but rather on smaller-scale, more community-based efforts. He said this policy position is, in part, due to the historical deference such multinational conglomerates of nations have given to China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases overall.
He said agreements within the U.S. itself, with businesses and all levels of government working together, have produced the best results so far when it comes to improving the environment. He also pointed to examples of constructive action that don’t involve billions of dollars, such as families making the choice to spend more time outdoors or engaging in local activities that contribute to environmental conservation and community life, such as anti-litter campaigns and community gardening. The overarching goal, he said, should be to “leave God’s creation better than we found it.”
Roberts — who said he personally believes humans likely have “very little effect” on the climate — said he was discouraged to read other portions of Laudato Si’, as well as Laudate Deum, that to him read as though they had come “straight out of the U.N.” Despite his criticisms, Roberts urged his fellow Catholics to continue to pray for the Holy Father and to listen to the pope’s moral insights.
“I just think that the proposed solutions are actually more anti-human and worse than the purported effects of climate change,” he added.
‘A far more complex issue’
Greg Sindelar, a Catholic who serves as CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think tank that studies the energy industry, similarly expressed concerns to CNA about the potential impact of certain climate change mitigation policies on human flourishing.
Like Roberts, Sindelar spoke highly of certain aspects of the pope’s message while expressing reservations about some of the U.N.-esque solutions proposed in Laudate Deum.
“I think the pope is right about our duty as Catholics to be stewards and to care for the environment. But I think what we have to understand — what we have to balance this with — is that it cannot come at the expense of depriving people of affordable and reliable energy,” Sindelar said in an interview with CNA.
“There’s ways to be environmentally friendly without sacrificing the access that we all need to reliable and affordable energy.”
Greg Sindelar is CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank in America’s leading energy-producing state. Courtesy of Texas Public Policy Foundation
Sindelar said TPPF primarily promotes cheap, reliable access to energy as a means of promoting human flourishing. The free-market-focused group is skeptical of top-down governmental intervention, both in the form of regulation and incentives or disincentives in certain areas of the energy sector.
When asked what he thinks his fellow Catholics largely think about the issue, Sindelar said many of the Catholics he hears from express the view that government policies and interventions rarely produce effective solutions and could potentially hinder access to energy for those in need.
“I think it’s a far more complex issue than just saying we need to cut emissions, and we need to transfer away from fossil fuels, and all these other things. What we need to do is figure out and ensure ways that we are providing affordable and reliable electricity to all citizens of the world,” he reiterated.
“When the pope speaks, when the Vatican speaks, it carries a lot of weight with Catholics around the world, [and] not just with Catholics … and I totally agree with him that we need to be thinking about the most marginalized and the poorest amongst us,” Sindelar continued.
“[But] by going down these policy prescription paths that he’s recommending, we’re actually going to reduce their ability to have access to that,” he asserted.
Sindelar, while disagreeing with Pope Francis’ call for an “abandonment of fossil fuels,” said he appreciates the fact that Pope Francis has spoken out about the issue of care for creation and has initiated so much public discussion.
“I think there is room for differing views and opinions on the right ways to do that,” he said.
Effective mitigation efforts
Susan Varlamoff, a retired biologist and parishioner at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in the Atlanta area, is among those Catholics who are committed to Pope Francis’ call to care for creation and to mitigate the effects of climate change. To that end, Varlamoff in 2016 created a peer-reviewed action plan for the Archdiocese of Atlanta to help Catholics put the principles contained in Laudato Si’ into action, mainly through smaller, more personal actions that people can take to reduce their energy usage.
Retired biologist Susan Varlamoff. Photo courtesy of Susan Varlamoff
The Atlanta Archdiocese’s efforts have since garnered recognition and praise, Varlamoff said, with at least 35 archdioceses now involved in an inter-diocesan network formed to exchange sustainability ideas based on the latest version of the plan from Atlanta.
“It’s fascinating to see what everybody is doing, and it’s basically based on their talents and imaginations,” Varlamoff said, noting that a large number of young people have gotten involved with their efforts.
As a scientist, Varlamoff told CNA it is clear to her that Pope Francis knows what he’s talking about when he lays out the dangers posed by inaction in the face of climate change.
“He understands the science, and he’s deeply concerned … he’s got remarkable influence as a moral leader,” she said.
“Part of what our religion asks us to do is to care for one another. We have to care for creation if we’re going to care for one another, because the earth is our natural resource system, our life support, and we cannot care for one another if we don’t have that life support.”
Responding to criticisms about the financial costs associated with certain green initiatives, Varlamoff noted that small-scale sustainable actions can actually save money. She offered the example of parishes in the Atlanta area that have drastically reduced their electric bills by installing solar panels.
“[But,] it’s not just about saving money. It’s also about reducing fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions, and protecting the natural resources for future generations,” she said.
Moreover, Varlamoff said, the moral imperative to improve the natural environment for future generations is worth the investment. “When [Catholics] give money, for example, for a social justice issue like Walking with Moms in Need or special needs, the payback is improving lives. We’re improving the environment here,” she emphasized.
Pierre, S.D., Jan 29, 2020 / 12:26 am (CNA).- A bill aiming to ban sex-reassignment surgery and puberty-blocking medication for minors in South Dakota cleared a House committee Jan. 22, and is set to be debated in the House of Representatives.
Human beings are made in the image and likeness of the divine – declare Scriptures. Slavery needs to be banished from the face of the Earth. Slave owners need to be evangelized with appropriate doses of the Good News.
Human beings are made in the image and likeness of the divine – declare Scriptures. Slavery needs to be banished from the face of the Earth. Slave owners need to be evangelized with appropriate doses of the Good News.