Denver, Colo., Nov 20, 2019 / 04:15 pm (CNA).- On a partly cloudy and relatively pleasant November morning in downtown Denver, volunteers with the Knights of Columbus set up tents for distributing new puffy winter coats, as well as snacks, socks and wa… […]
Thiruvananthapuram, India, Nov 20, 2019 / 04:03 pm (CNA).- The Catholic Church in Kerala is hoping to help widows in India – who often suffer from social stigmas – through its new matchmaking website.
This fall, the Family Commission of the Kerala Cat… […]
Washington D.C., Nov 20, 2019 / 03:10 pm (CNA).- A new report by a leading legal group claims that, despite deep division and polarization in the U.S., there is still a national consensus for a broad interpretation of religious freedom.
“The cen… […]
Vatican City, Nov 20, 2019 / 02:05 pm (CNA).- A criminal prosecutor in Argentina has requested the arrest of Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who is accused of sexually abusing two seminarians. Zanchetta is suspended from a position at the Vatican’s central bank, where he was appointed an “assessor” by Pope Francis in 2017.
Zanchetta is accused of sexually abusing two seminarians, and was criminally charged in June. He could face three to 10 years in prison if he is convicted.
The bishop lives in the Vatican City State, at the Domus Santa Marta, the same hotel at which Pope Francis resides.
A prosecutor of sexual crimes in Orán, María Soledad Filtrín Cuezzo, has requested international assistance in Zanchetta’s arrest, because, according to El Tribuno newspaper, the bishop has not responded to repeated telephone calls or emails to the contact information provided by his defense counsel.
Cuezzo had opposed allowing Zanchetta to leave the country, according to El Tribuno, but the bishop was permitted to leave after he presented a document showing that he is employed within Vatican City. She has also said that she had frequently found it necessary to request assistance from the apostolic nuncio in Argentina in order to ensure that Zanchetta appeared in court during proceedings in his case.
Zanchetta is alleged to have sent sexually explicit selfies from his cell phone, harassed seminarians, and mismanaged the finances of the Diocese of Oran, which he led from 2014 to 2017.
Earlier this month, police raided chancery offices in Oran.
The bishop resigned from his diocese in 2017, citing health reasons. Four month later, Pope Francis appointed him to a newly-created position in the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which oversees the Vatican’s assets and real estate holdings.
Reporting from Argentine sources suggests that the bishop was first accused of sexually inappropriate behavior in 2015.
According to a February report from El Tribuno, one of the Zanchetta’s secretaries alerted authorities after accidentally finding sexually explicit images sent and received on Zanchetta’s cell phone in 2015. The complaint says that some of the images depict “young people” having sex in addition to lewd images of Zanchetta himself.
The bishop claimed his phone and computer had been hacked, and that the accusations were motivated anti-Francis voices.
Pope Francis summoned Zanchetta to Rome for five days in October 2015. The pope appeared to have accepted Zanchetta’s excuse that his cell phone had been hacked, and dismissed the allegations.
The Vatican has stated twice that officials did not know about Zanchetta’s misdeeds until 2018, a claim that is disputed by Fr. Juan José Manzano, the former vicar general of the Diocese of Orán. Manzano claims that he reported Zanchetta in 2015, after the pornographic images were found on his phone. Manzano says he also reported him again in 2017.
The report also says three of Zanchetta’s vicars general and two monsignors made a formal internal complaint before the Argentinian nunciature in 2016, alleging inappropriate behavior with seminarians.
That behavior included entering their rooms at night, requesting massages from them, waking up seminarians in the morning, sitting on their beds, drinking alcohol with them, and favoring more the more attractive young men.
The 2017 internal accusation, which The Tribune says alleged more explicit abuse by Zanchetta of seminarians, resulted in Zanchetta’s exit from the diocese, though Zanchetta said he was resigning for health reasons. The Vatican did not open an investigation at that time.
Pope Francis said in January that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is now investigating Zanchetta.
It is not yet clear whether the bishop will be apprehended in the Vatican City State and extradited to Argentina.
ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, contributed to this report.
San Francisco, Calif., Nov 20, 2019 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- A third federal judge has struck down the Trump administration’s conscience protection rule for medical professionals who object to abortions because of their religious beliefs.
U.S. D… […]
Washington D.C., Nov 20, 2019 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- A new report claims that the Syrian refugee crisis is severely burdening Lebanon’s limited resources and threatens its pluralism, requiring immediate international assistance.
“Lebanon … […]
Bangkok, Thailand, Nov 20, 2019 / 12:09 pm (CNA).- Pope Francis’ trip to Thailand is a meaningful moment for the small Catholic community, and marks an important anniversary in the life of the Catholic Church in the southeast Asian country, the s… […]
Madrid, Spain, Nov 20, 2019 / 10:56 am (CNA).- Gádor Joya, a pediatrician and a legislator of the Assembly of Madrid from the Vox party, operates the “Life Ambulance Project” outside abortion clinics in the city, offering ultrasounds to pregnant women.
“I and other doctors have been giving these women ultrasounds… Precisely because I have been doing this, I know what has been hidden from these women. Most of them, when they receive the information and hear the heartbeat, decide to go forward with their pregnancies,” Joya said at a meeting of the regional health committee Nov. 5, according to Madrid daily El País.
The ultrasounds are performed in a van near the clinics. The van has been authorized by the health department.
Joya has long been a pro-life advocate. She spoke at the 2014 French march for life, saying that “we know that at the end the Truth will triumph, and abortion will disappear from our society.
The Life Ambulance Project is opposed by Mónica García of Más Madrid, a progressive regional party.
García said that “what we could not have imagined is that there would be people performing ultrasounds on the street. It’s extremely serious.”
Vox is often described as a far-right party. In this month’s Spanish general election, the party took 52 seats. The party opposes both abortion and same-sex marriage.
The November general election was inconclusive. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party took 120 seats, and will try to form a coalition government, which it failed to do following the last general election, held in April.
Vox more than doubled its seats thismonth, having won 24 in April.
Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, said after the Nov. 10 election that “today a patriotic alternative and a social alternative has been consolidated in Spain that demands national unity and the restoration of constitutional order in Catalonia.”
Vatican City, Nov 20, 2019 / 09:40 am (CNA).- The Holy See on Wednesday reaffirmed its support of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, after recent shifts in U.S. policy threatened to derail hopes of an agreement.
“In the context of re… […]
Tokyo, Japan, Nov 20, 2019 / 04:00 am (CNA).- The Archbishop of Tokyo, Isao Kikuchi, spoke with CNA about the challenge for Japanese Catholic churches to keep Catholics engaged, in the face of ongoing population decline and growing religious apathy from Japanese youth.
“Population decline due to the low birth rate and the aging population is not just a problem for the church but a problem for the entire Japanese society.”
The archbishop’s remarks came shortly before Pope Francis is due to visit Japan Nov. 23-26.
The “birthrate crisis,” as the Japanese call it, is indeed considered one of the most dangerous threats facing Japan’s short-term future.
Each successive generation since the economic bubble has dropped in population, with many Japanese going unmarried or remaining childless. Even among young parents who do conceive, the average amount of children is between one and two.
Families with three children are not very common, and families with more than three are extremely rare.
This ongoing collapse in the national population has negatively affected all sects of Japanese society. Young men and women now face a future in a country with an economy expected to drastically worsen. Elderly generations are finding it difficult to survive on the government’s retirement budget as the gap between the number of elderly retirees and the number of working citizens gradually shrinks.
“For example, when we look at the situation in convenience stores, many of those who work there are either elderly Japanese people or young foreigners,” Archbishop Kikuchi told CNA.
Until recently, foreign convenience store clerks had been a rarity in Japan. Now, close to 60,000 foreigners are employed at convenience stores throughout the country. Many are students seeking part-time work while living abroad.
“The same scenario is reflected in the church today, and since it is no different from the situation of the Japanese society, I do not feel that it is in a dangerous level as it is,” Kikuchi said.
“Rather, since the church is a small community accounting only to less than 1% of the population, I see it as an opportunity for the Good News to be preached everywhere, a potential to yet expand evangelization activities.”
According to the most recent available data, approximately 35% of Japanese claim Buddhism as their religion, while around 3-4% claim strict adherence to Shinto or associated folk religions. Only 1-2% of Japanese claim Christianity as their religion, and only around half of Japanese Christians are Catholic.
“I acknowledge however that the Catholic faith not being passed on by the parents to their children is a big problem. This is due primarily to the collapse of the traditional Japanese family system in the context of our present society.”
The Japanese sense of the “traditional family system” to which the archbishop refer is straightforward: a hard-working father who puts bread on the table; a mother dedicated to keeping the wallet, house, and kids in check; the children, who spend time between the home, school, and community groups such as sports teams; and the grandparents, typically parents of the mother, who help raise the children and maintain the house as best they can.
This style of family has also been called a “multi-generational household,” and is becoming increasingly rare in Japan, especially in major metropolitan areas such as Tokyo.
“The collapse is caused by the situation in the workplace that goes along with the changing Japanese economic situation (non-regular employment, overtime, working parents),” said Archbishop Kikuchi.
“And the excessive activities in the education of children,” the archbishop added, noting that extracurricular activities are held on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, and students are often tied up for extra hours in “cram schools” due to the deterioration of the quality of education.
Japan’s ruthless work culture is hardly unknown. The image of the exhausted salaryman working unpaid overtime deep into the night is a symbol that is recognizably Japanese in countries around the world, and one of the most enduring stereotypes of the Japanese people.
In recent generations, women have also more frequently entered the workforce – willingly or sometimes without a choice due to the economic pressures of raising children.
Less well known, however, are the strict expectations put on middle school and high school students to join and participate in after-school groups with their peers. More than just the competitive sports teams – clubs for music, art, and dance prove to be highly demanding of children’s time.
Just as their parents are burdened with work expectations, children often spend more time out of the house than in it.
“From abroad, we even hear voices pointing out that school and community events held on Saturdays and Sundays are silently persecuting religion,” laments the archbishop.
Many athletic groups demand members to practice on Saturday and Sunday – the time when most families should be going to mass.
“In addition, such a collapse in the traditional Japanese family system has caused marriages to break down, with single mothers raising their children in poverty,” said the archbishop.
“Under such circumstances, it has become difficult to find time to bring children to church on Sundays, and likewise difficult to find time to share the faith at home.”
While club participation isn’t mandatory, it is expected. Failing to join a sports team or interest-based group can severely handicap a student socially.
And while couples are financially rewarded for creating larger families, the government has been unable to give young Japanese a sufficient push to make them comfortable with the traditional idea of family-making.
Free kindergarten and child-care have recently been established after a recent bill passed – the legislation was offered as a way to encourage more children, taking the burden of early care off of the mother and father.
But monthly stipends and free nursery school are not enough to pull the tide of Japanese population decline in the other direction.
“Merely admonishing people to bring back the traditional home is not a solution. The problem concerns not only the church, but must be tackled by the entire society. Should this situation continue on, I am afraid not only the home but also the local community will collapse and disappear from the whole Japanese society.”
© Catholic World Report