Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 6, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).
Here’s a roundup of Catholic world news from the past week that you might have missed:
Petition to Pope Leo XIV to remove German cardinal gains over 60K signatures
A petition launched by a Munich priest to Pope Leo XIV calling for the dismissal of Cologne, Germany, archbishop Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki has gained 60,130 signatures, CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, reported on Wednesday.
The German-language petition accuses Woelki of moral corruption and argues that he has lost all credibility in the public sphere and the Church at large after investigations of the cardinal were discontinued after the payment of a 26,000-euro (about $29,700) fine. The petition cites the cardinal’s alleged failure to deal with sexual abuse by Church officials as legal basis for dismissal under canon law.
Attempted suicide bombers killed outside Ugandan Martyrs’ Day memorial event
Ugandan Bishop Christopher Kakooza of the Lugazi Diocese urged pilgrims participating in Martyrs’ Day celebrations on Tuesday to carry on the legacy of the Ugandan martyrs as local authorities intercepted and killed two alleged terrorists, including a female suicide bomber, outside the event.
During his homily at the event, the bishop encouraged the congregation to “endure just like the martyrs who suffered with hope for what was to come.”
A local news outlet reported that a counterterrorism unit “intercepted and neutralized” a man and a female suicide bomber on a motorbike headed toward the commemorative event after an explosive detonated about midway to the church.
Kenyan bishop appeals for unity among warring communities after priest’s murder
Bishop Dominic Kimengich of the Kenyan Diocese of Eldoret is urging warring factions in the bandit-infested Kerio Valley to end violence and division following the murder of a local priest, Father Allois Cheruiyot Bett, reported ACI Africa, CNA’s news partner in Africa, on Tuesday.
In a heartfelt plea on the sidelines of the requiem Mass for the priest on Monday, June 2, the bishop appealed for an end to the long decades of violence and division in the territiry. “We speak the same language … So, what are these? Where is the problem?” he said, adding: “Can we not sit down and be serious once and for all?”
Cheruiyot Bett was fatally shot by assailants while returning from Mass at his parish on May 22.
Patriarch Younan meets Pope Leo XIV, calls for support of Middle East Christians
In their first official meeting, Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican to discuss the plight of Christians in the Middle East, ACI MENA, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner, reported.
Younan shared concerns over emigration, the loss of youth, and the need for continued spiritual and humanitarian support. He highlighted his church’s efforts in pastoral care both in the East and in diaspora communities while calling for deeper ecumenical cooperation, especially with the Syriac Orthodox Church.
Monastic order appeals for return of seized lands in Mosul
The Antonine Hermizdian Chaldean Order is appealing to Iraqi authorities to return more than 1,400 dunams (346 acres) of land that it claims were unjustly confiscated during Saddam Hussein’s regime, ACI MENA reported. The call comes after a recent government initiative reallocated part of that land for a housing project for Christian returnees — without acknowledging its original monastic ownership.
The order, led by Abbot Samer Sourisho, says it is willing to donate hundreds of plots of land to Christian families if the full land is restored. Despite multiple legal attempts since 2003 — including a rejected lawsuit in 2012 — the monastic order says the Iraqi state continues to ignore historical land claims.
Sourisho criticized the local government for “generously giving away what it does not own” and described the situation as emblematic of how past injustices are being entrenched instead of corrected.
The monks called on the state to recognize their rightful ownership and support the return of displaced Christians by empowering religious institutions, not sidelining them.
Over 10,000 Vietnamese Catholics participate in Marian jubilee pilgrimage
Over 10,000 Vietnamese Catholics from across the Da Nang Diocese took part in a jubilee pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Our Lady of Tra Kieu, according to Agenzia Fides.
The pilgrimage took place on the solemnity of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, May 31. Archbishop Joseph Dang Duc presided over Mass, which was concelebrated by hundreds of priests. The archbishop described the event as one “of love, faith, commitment, and service, an opportunity to profess one’s faith in the face of the challenges of the present time.”
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Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki is one of the few traditional prelates remaining in Germany. He’s been charged with allegations previously. Most of the uproar against him seems related to his doctrinal orthodoxy.
Newsweek, like most anti Catholic media, calls Woelki morally corrupt. He’s opposed, among other doctrinal errors blessing of same sex marriage, now opposing such blessings a mortal sin in the progressive German Church. Pope Leo XIV has an obligation to correct or remove the heretics in the German Church and promote the remaining orthodox to save it from its apostasy.
Absolutely outrageous.
To this outsider, the petition sounds infantile. Just what one might suspect from the bubble-world der Synodal Weg, especially since the charge was formally examined two or three years ago, and dropped.
Three points and a summary:
FIRST, the camouflaged issue is what to do about der Synodal Weg which recently issued guidelines on how to choreograph (with scheduled music!) blessings–against even the flimsy restrictions in Fiducia Supplicans (to be informal and only spontaneous). Woelki in Germany is in step with those fully rejected Fiducia Supplicans: all of continental Africa, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Peru, Kazakhstan, the Coptic Church, and parts of Spain, France and Argentina (and others).
SECOND, the great irony and contradiction is that the earlier rupture of the anti-Catholic Reformation was ignited when the German Augustinian friar Martin Luther was challenged in the confessional by parishioners who insisted they could bypass conversion because they had in hand certificates (like “synodal” votes?) in exchange for tin cup donations for bogus “indulgences”. BELOW is a Protestant account…
THIRD, so, today, 60,000 signatures…that’s equivalent to 1/5th of the Catholics who left the Church in Germany in the year 2024 (321,661), and about 1/200th of one percent of the world’s Catholic population (1.4 Billion).
SUMMARY: The petition (or certificate!) is like giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dead horse.
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“…Many of the townspeople came successively, and confessed themselves guilty of great excesses. Adultery, licentiousness, usury, ill-gotten gains—such are the crimes acknowledged to the minister of the Word by those souls of which he will one day have to give an account. He reprimands, corrects, instructs. But what is his astonishment when these individuals reply that they will not abandon their sins?….Greatly shocked, the pious monk [friar] declares that since they will not promise to change their lives, he cannot absolve them. The unhappy creatures then appeal to their letters of indulgence; they show them, and maintain their virtue. But Luther replies that he has nothing to do with these papers; and adds: EXCEPT YE REPENT, YE SHALL ALL LIKEWISE PERISH [italics]. [….] ‘Have a care,’ added he, ‘how you listen to the clamours of these [synodal?] indulgence-merchants: you have better things to do than buy these licenses which they sell at so vile a price [“For polygamy it was six ducats; for sacrilege and perjury, nine ducats; for murder, eight ducats; for witchcraft, two ducats….For infanticide…four livres tourquois; and for paricide or fratricide, one ducat”].”
(Source: J.H. Merle D’Aubigne, Geneva, “History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century,” Vols. I-IV, 1850 with later reprints; 700 fine-print double-column pages).
60.000 signatures is nothing compared to the German Church statistics that count: 500.000 Catholic taxpayers formally leave the Catholic dystopian Synodal Superlodge being erected on the wastelands of novos Ordo. Pope Leo needs rather to take note of the fact of the matter in Germany : millions of former Catholics have already fled the German Apostasy on steroids.
Mr. Beaulieu above – I had never heard that explanation of Luther’s opposition to indulgences. I thought his opposition was to indulgences as we understand them today.
I would say “both”, in that Luther eventually championed the expanded and heretical position that all works (not only indulgences) are of no benefit or meaning, and instead that salvation depends exclusively on grace. Involved in this departure is nothing less than our basic understanding of the human person and then the working of grace as significantly gifted through the Church’s sacraments.
The implication of Lutheranism, then, is that by his own actions (namely original sin) fallen man has rendered mankind totally depraved through and through. The Catholic teaching, instead, is that original sin does not annihilate the goodness of God’s original creation, and that after baptism we have only a predisposition toward sin. This is the accurate meaning of “concupiscence.” Clarity on the meaning of the term concupiscence remained an issue even after the 1999 “Joint Declaration on Justification” which then was signed by leaders in the Catholic Church and from the Lutheran ecclesial communities.
The complete version of the Declaration includes both the main TEXT and the ANNEX. From the Annex–part of the “differentiated consensus”–we find embedded, in the question of justification, the variously understood meaning of “concupiscence.” The half-page PREFACE reminds that the total Declaration consists of both the Text and the Annex. (Protestant printings often omit the Annex.)
In the added Annex—which is INTEGRAL to the complete Joint Declaration—Ratzinger finds it necessary still to clarify, for example: “The concept of ‘concupiscence’ is used in different senses on the Catholic and Lutheran sides. In the Lutheran Confessional writings ‘concupiscence’ is understood as the self-seeking desire of the human being, which in light of the law, spiritually understood, is REGARDED AS SIN. In the Catholic understanding concupiscence is an INCLINATION, remaining in human beings even after baptism, which comes from sin and presses toward sin” (caps added).
Petition to Pope Leo XIV to Correct Cardinal Walter Kaspar of Germany for Denying the Resurrection of The Body of Jesus:
1. Cardinal Kaspar, when a priest, published his book “Jesus the Christ” in 1974, in which Kaspar denies the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, asserting that Jesus did not resurrect in his body, but that he only “obtruded in the spirit.” In the same book, Kaspar also denied the miracles of Jesus, including the calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the Transfiguration, and the the raising of the widow’s son, the daughter of Jairus, and Lazarus. Kaspar summed up his rejection of the Gospel testimony of Jesus’ resurrection and miracles by saying “we probably don’t need to believe” these things.
2. Cardinal Kaspar, when a Cardinal, re-published the second edition of his same book in 2011, restating his denials.
3. Therefore, Pope Leo XIV is petitioned to have Cardinal Kaspar publicly retract his denials and renounce his book publishing the same, and if Cardinal Kaspar refuses, then he should be removed as a Cardinal, Bishop and Priest, and his book should be publicly condemned as heresy, and he should be publicly declared a heretic.
4. Because if you deny the Gospel Accounts, you do not hold and teach the Apostolic Faith.